


Encode::PerlIO(3pPerl Programmers Reference GuiEncode::PerlIO(3p)


NAME
       Encode::PerlIO -- a detailed document on Encode and PerlIO

Overview
       It is very common to want to do encoding transformations
       when reading or writing files, network connections, pipes
       etc.  If Perl is configured to use the new 'perlio' IO
       system then "Encode" provides a "layer" (see PerlIO) which
       can transform data as it is read or written.

       Here is how the blind poet would modernise the encoding:

           use Encode;
           open(my $iliad,'<:encoding(iso-8859-7)','iliad.greek');
           open(my $utf8,'>:utf8','iliad.utf8');
           my @epic = <$iliad>;
           print $utf8 @epic;
           close($utf8);
           close($illiad);

       In addition, the new IO system can also be configured to
       read/write UTF-8 encoded characters (as noted above, this
       is efficient):

           open(my $fh,'>:utf8','anything');
           print $fh "Any \x{0021} string \N{SMILEY FACE}\n";

       Either of the above forms of "layer" specifications can be
       made the default for a lexical scope with the "use open
       ..." pragma. See open.

       Once a handle is open, its layers can be altered using
       "binmode".

       Without any such configuration, or if Perl itself is built
       using the system's own IO, then write operations assume
       that the file handle accepts only bytes and will "die" if
       a character larger than 255 is written to the handle. When
       reading, each octet from the handle becomes a byte-in-a-
       character. Note that this default is the same behaviour as
       bytes-only languages (including Perl before v5.6) would
       have, and is sufficient to handle native 8-bit encodings
       e.g. iso-8859-1, EBCDIC etc. and any legacy mechanisms for
       handling other encodings and binary data.

       In other cases, it is the program's responsibility to
       transform characters into bytes using the API above before
       doing writes, and to transform the bytes read from a
       handle into characters before doing "character operations"
       (e.g. "lc", "/\W+/", ...).

       You can also use PerlIO to convert larger amounts of data
       you don't want to bring into memory.  For example, to
       convert between ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) and UTF-8 (or UTF-



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Encode::PerlIO(3pPerl Programmers Reference GuiEncode::PerlIO(3p)


       EBCDIC in EBCDIC machines):

           open(F, "<:encoding(iso-8859-1)", "data.txt") or die $!;
           open(G, ">:utf8",                 "data.utf") or die $!;
           while (<F>) { print G }

           # Could also do "print G <F>" but that would pull
           # the whole file into memory just to write it out again.

       More examples:

           open(my $f, "<:encoding(cp1252)")
           open(my $g, ">:encoding(iso-8859-2)")
           open(my $h, ">:encoding(latin9)")       # iso-8859-15

       See also encoding for how to change the default encoding
       of the data in your script.

How does it work?
       Here is a crude diagram of how filehandle, PerlIO, and
       Encode interact.

         filehandle <-> PerlIO        PerlIO <-> scalar (read/printed)
                              \      /
                               Encode

       When PerlIO receives data from either direction, it fills
       a buffer (currently with 1024 bytes) and passes the buffer
       to Encode.  Encode tries to convert the valid part and
       passes it back to PerlIO, leaving invalid parts (usually a
       partial character) in the buffer.  PerlIO then appends
       more data to the buffer, calls Encode again, and so on
       until the data stream ends.

       To do so, PerlIO always calls (de|en)code methods with
       CHECK set to 1.  This ensures that the method stops at the
       right place when it encounters partial character.  The
       following is what happens when PerlIO and Encode tries to
       encode (from utf8) more than 1024 bytes and the buffer
       boundary happens to be in the middle of a character.

          A   B   C   ....   ~     \x{3000}    ....
         41  42  43   ....  7E   e3   80   80  ....
         <- buffer --------------->
         << encoded >>>>>>>>>>
                              <- next buffer ------

       Encode converts from the beginning to \x7E, leaving \xe3
       in the buffer because it is invalid (partial character).

       Unfortunately, this scheme does not work well with escape-
       based encodings such as ISO-2022-JP.





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Encode::PerlIO(3pPerl Programmers Reference GuiEncode::PerlIO(3p)


Line Buffering
       Now let's see what happens when you try to decode from
       ISO-2022-JP and the buffer ends in the middle of a
       character.

                     JIS208-ESC   \x{5f3e}
          A   B   C   ....   ~   \e   $   B  |DAN | ....
         41  42  43   ....  7E   1b  24  41  43  46 ....
         <- buffer --------------------------->
         << encoded >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

       As you see, the next buffer begins with \x43.  But \x43 is
       'C' in ASCII, which is wrong in this case because we are
       now in JISX 0208 area so it has to convert \x43\x46, not
       \x43.  Unlike utf8 and EUC, in escape-based encodings you
       can't tell if a given octet is a whole character or just
       part of it.

       Fortunately PerlIO also supports line buffer if you tell
       PerlIO to use one instead of fixed buffer.  Since
       ISO-2022-JP is guaranteed to revert to ASCII at the end of
       the line, partial character will never happen when line
       buffer is used.

       To tell PerlIO to use line buffer, implement ->needs_lines
       method for your encoding object.  See  Encode::Encoding
       for details.

       Thanks to these efforts most encodings that come with
       Encode support PerlIO but that still leaves following
       encodings.

         iso-2022-kr
         MIME-B
         MIME-Header
         MIME-Q

       Fortunately iso-2022-kr is hardly used (according to
       Jungshik) and MIME-* are very unlikely to be fed to PerlIO
       because they are for mail headers.  See
       Encode::MIME::Header for details.

   How can I tell whether my encoding fully supports PerlIO ?
       As of this writing, any encoding whose class belongs to
       Encode::XS and Encode::Unicode works.  The Encode module
       has a "perlio_ok" method which you can use before applying
       PerlIO encoding to the filehandle.  Here is an example:










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         my $use_perlio = perlio_ok($enc);
         my $layer = $use_perlio ? "<:raw" : "<:encoding($enc)";
         open my $fh, $layer, $file or die "$file : $!";
         while(<$fh>){
           $_ = decode($enc, $_) unless $use_perlio;
           # ....
         }

SEE ALSO
       Encode::Encoding, Encode::Supported, Encode::PerlIO,
       encoding, perlebcdic, "open" in perlfunc, perlunicode,
       utf8, the Perl Unicode Mailing List
       <perl-unicode@perl.org>












































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