GNU Awk (gawk) isn't really Unicode-capable. Perl is. Using a2p in this case is just causing you needless confusion, especially if your objective is to learn how to handle Unicode using Perl. Your Unicode text substitution is trivially accomplished in Perl 5.18, which is the version you said you're using.

use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.16;

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

printf "\N{U+FEFF}"; # Unicode byte order mark

my $text = "Unicode code point U+100049:  \N{U+100049}\n";

print $text;

$text =~ s/100049/002190/;
$text =~ s/\N{U+100049}/\N{U+002190}/;

print $text;

exit 0;

__END__
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Unicode code point U+100049:  􀁉
Unicode code point U+002190:  ←

I have tried exactly that and it works just fine. Thank you very much!

And I tested this version and it also works:

$txline = $_;
$ch1 = "\N{U+100049}";
$ch2 = "\N{u+2190}";
$txline =~ s/$ch1/$ch2/g;
[download]

Again many thanks, this helps my understanding a lot.

Peter

However, none of these techniques seems to be working for me.

How do you know? Consider ddumper^{Basic debugging checklist} Basic debugging checklist item 4

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict; use warnings;
use Data::Dump qw/ dd /;
use feature qw/ unicode_strings /;
my $uni = qq{\N{U+1000049} \N{U+2190}};
dd( $uni );
$uni =~ s{\N{U+1000049}}{\N{U+2190}}gx;
dd( $uni );
__END__
"\x{1000049} \x{2190}"
"\x{2190} \x{2190}"
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Also, a step-by-step explanation of the Perl code generated by a2p for the gawk gsub function would be much appreciated as a teaching tool to help me learn perl.

Start with perlintro, perlrebackslash, perlrequick, and Re: calling awk one liner from perl

Learning perl from a2p is going to be though

Thanks for the reference to Data::Dumper, very useful.

Yes, I am sure that I am not getting the translation in my code since I did follow the "Basic debugging checklist" item 2, using print and printf to dump the results of the substitutions and the intermediate variable $s_ after each attempt. Using your suggested Data:Dumper code I also confirmed the print* results. Here is my code updated with your Data::Dumper suggestion and a few additional printf's, followed by the output results:

use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use feature 'unicode_strings';

use Data::Dump qw/ dd /;

my $txt;
my $tx1;
my $s_;
my $TestCh1;
my $TestCh2;

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';
printf "\x{FEFF}";

# $txt = "This =>\N{U+100049}<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16";
$txt = "This =>&#1048649;<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16";
printf "Dumping \$txt=";
dd( $txt );

$tx1 = $txt;
$tx1 =~ s/"\\N{U+100049}"/"\N{U+2190}"/ge;

print "0:\$txt=" . $tx1;
print "\n";
printf "Dumping \$tx1=";
dd( $tx1 );
print "\n";

$tx1 = $txt;
$tx1 =~ s/\\xF4\\x80\\x81\\x89/"\\N{U+2190}"/ge;

print "1:\$txt=" . $tx1;
print "\n";
printf "Dumping \$tx1=";
dd( $tx1 );
print "\n";

$tx1 = $txt;
$TestCh1 = "\\xF4\\x80\\x81\\x89";
$TestCh2 = "\\N{U+2190}";

($s_ = '"'.($TestCh2).'"') =~ s/&/\$&/g;
print "2:\$s_=" . $s_ . "!, \$TestCh1=" . $TestCh1 . "!, \$TestCh2=" .
+ $TestCh2 . "!\n";

$tx1 =~ s/$TestCh1/eval $s_/ge;
print "2:\$tx1=" . $tx1 . "!\n";
print "\n";
printf "Dumping \$tx1=";
dd( $tx1 );
print "\n";

$tx1 = $txt;
$TestCh2 = "\\xE2\\x86\\x90";
($s_ = '"'.($TestCh2).'"') =~ s/&/\$&/g;
print "3:\$s_=" . $s_ . "!, \$TestCh1=" . $TestCh1 . "!, \$TestCh2=" .
+ $TestCh2 . "!\n";

$tx1 =~ s/$TestCh1/eval $s_/ge;
print "3:\$tx1=" . $tx1 . "!";
print "\n";
printf "Dumping \$tx1=";
dd( $tx1 );
print "\n";
__END__
Dumping $txt="This =>\x{100049}<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16"
0:$txt=This =>&#1048649;<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16
Dumping $tx1="This =>\x{100049}<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16"

1:$txt=This =>&#1048649;<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16
Dumping $tx1="This =>\x{100049}<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16"

2:$s_="\N{U+2190}"!, $TestCh1=\xF4\x80\x81\x89!, $TestCh2=\N{U+2190}!
2:$tx1=This =>&#1048649;<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16!

Dumping $tx1="This =>\x{100049}<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16"

3:$s_="\xE2\x86\x90"!, $TestCh1=\xF4\x80\x81\x89!, $TestCh2=\xE2\x86\x
+90!
3:$tx1=This =>&#1048649;<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16!
Dumping $tx1="This =>\x{100049}<= is a Unicode character in Plane 16"
[download]

Your use of curly braces as quoting characters in your example is a little bit confusing to me. Won't simple slashes do just as well in your example? Or is there some other subtle reason to use the braces instead?

What's confusing to me in the a2p translation of the gsub function is that in the substitution expression the replacement text variable $s_ is preceded by an "eval" and the suffix modifier "e" is also used which is supposed to do an "eval" on the replacement expression. Does that mean that the variable $s_ is "eval"ed twice? And if that is true, why is it done that way?

Thanks again for your help.

Peter

Yes, I am sure that I am not getting the translation in my code since

Well compare your 1st substitution with mine, yours has \\N{...} which is not the same as \N (a \ escapes a \ so \\ means a literal \)

your second substitution maybe looks broken by perlmonks only supporting latin-1 charset
s/&/\$&/g; is that what you had?

your third substitution attemps to replace raw utf bytes representation of that unicode code points .. which might work if you're dealing with bytes/octets in your string but you're dealing with unicode codepoints not their byte representations ( perlunitut, perlunitut: Unicode in Perl ) probably a2p eval eval eval stuff

Basically, way too much eval/interpolation/eval/indirection going to , too much overlap to reason about , too much stuff to visually compare

notice my example, very short, deals with one small string , and naturally works ;; copy my example :)

so my suggestion, stop doing too many operations in one (assign, concatenate , and substitute .. forget an eval )

Only deal with one string, one operation, one DDumper, ... final operation (substitution) final DDumper, end of program -- do a ddumper after every operation so you can notice the changes in the byte representations

:)

Your use of curly braces as quoting characters in your example is a little bit confusing to me. Won't simple slashes do just as well in your example? Or is there some other subtle reason to use the braces instead?

There is no subtle reason other than habit -- I often start by typing my examples on the commandline ( cmd.exe ) so I avoid ' and " because of that -- and I avoid  qq[] because of perlmonks (thats how you link on perlmonks ), and I avoid // so it doesn't look like m/// or s/// ... I really don't think about it much and I switch between all these between the hours of the day ... but {} is used for a lot of things in a lot of programming languages, so force of habit forces {} ... speaking of habits () is used even more but it always kinda irks me being up there above {} :D

Does that mean that the variable $s_ is "eval"ed twice?

No, its evaled "once" (for each match)
s{regex}{string} means replace that matched by regex with string
s{regex}{code}e means replace that matched by regex with result of code; the e in s///e tells the s///ubstitution operator that the s//STUFFHERE/e is code and not a string
s//STUFFHERE/e means treat stuffhere string as code
two ee-s in s//STUFFHERE/ee means treat stuffhere string as code, and treat the return value of that code as code
s//code/ee means s//eval code/e

And if that is true, why is it done that way?

Its an implementation detail -- simplest way to cover all possibilities ; a2p is a c program that parses awk programs and prints out perl programs ;; its computer generated code ( using byacc Compiler-compiler)

Like I said earlier, not a great way to learn perl ... great as a foothold for switchover from awk, but not a substitute for perlintro

Don't use printf as a substitute for print, the first (string) argument to printf is a template