David Graff wrote: > If I understand Nicholas Clark's suggestion, it would mean that for any > perl version prior to 5.8.0, the script won't compile unless "if.pm" > has been installed from CPAN. > > The fact that "if.pm" exists and is usable on older perl5 versions is > really good news, but it still might be a hurdle for some users who > depend on remote web-server sys-admins (or other uncontrollable forces) > for perl support...
But as the modules I'm writing are not core perl modules, they'd have to be installed anyway - I guess that's a problem whatever way I do it. I've got to say if.pm looks like a brilliantly simple way of handling my problem. > In any case, one work-around for handling utf8 text in a version-neutral > way would be to store this text in a file, not hard-coded into the perl > script; then decide how to read the file, depending on the version; e.g. > > open( DAYS, "day_names.utf8" ); > binmode( DAYS, ":utf8" ) if ( $] >= 5.008 ); > @day_names = <DAYS>; > close DAYS; > > Depending on what you do with the data elsewhere in your script, I'm not > sure whether 5.6 will treat the data as utf8 characters when read from > a file like this (5.6 does not support "binmode ':utf8', FH"), but > there's a good chance that it will work. > > You can also attach this text content at the end of your script, in a > __DATA__ segment, and set DATA as the file handle in the code sample > shown above (rather than DAYS). > > Of course even using __DATA__, it can get tedious and hard to maintain > if you have a lot of little string constants scattered throughout. Thanks - these are useful ideas which I'll use in some other modules I'm doing, but if.pm just feels right for what I'm trying to do ATM. > (P.S.: for some reason, three of the characters in your first string > didn't map to proper Cyrillic code points for me: \u04e9 and the two > occurrences of \u04af -- I don't know the language, but were those > typos?) Ah, I picked the example at random - I'm using data from the OpenI18N/ICU locales, and looking at the Kirghiz locale using the IBM ICU LocaleExplorer: http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/en/utf-8/?_=ky I see the same result - it also says: "Note: You're viewing an experimental locale. This locale is not part of the official ICU installation! Please do not file bugs against this locale" At the top, so who knows! I hate having to use languages that I don't understand and, based off feedback so far, there are problems with the ICU data as it stands. But I suppose a "comprehensive" set of locale date modules consisting of English and basic French wouldn't be quite so useful ;-> Thanks for the feedback, -- Richard Evans [EMAIL PROTECTED]
