On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 07:37:42AM -0700, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Bernie Cosell wrote: > > > I'm not sure if this is 'fun', but it might be at least curious: I don't > > have a UTF-8 system handy to try, but I'm wondering: what happens with > > the string-xor operator on UTF-8 strings. It obviously cannot work byte- > > by-byte, but it seems like it is going to be a bit tricky figuring out > > what you get when you xor a 1 byte character with a 2-byte one [I guess > > what it would have to do to be 'correct' would be to convert the UTF to > > "real Unicode", XOR the 32-bit "characters" together, and then compress > > that resulting "character" back to UTF-8... > > You got it! What happens with ~ is somewhat more complicated...
Actually, pedantically, the "32-bit" part is wrong; perl will use whatever normal unsigned integer type it knows about, which may very well be 64-bit. While the UTF-8 format is technically only defined up to 21 bits, perl just switches as needed to an extension of the format to provide up to 72 bits per character, which avoids having to do range checking all over (though only 32 or 64 bits will be actually usable, depending on perl's configuration).
