90 percent of my programming directly involves processing of Japanese (kanji,kana,alphabetic) strings and I have to admit I was thinking of deserting the flag and do more stuff in Ruby which has some appeal to Perl programmers, I pressume.

While for one-offs I sometimes use JPerl especially to do some tr /a-n/A-N/ (read a-n as Hiragana and A-N as Katakana) I almost exlusively use standard Perl. Of course, regular expressions will work with kanji (read: Shift JIS, euc-jp) but it is a kind of more complicated to implement and debbug them.

Definitly, Perl is not the best (=easy to learn, easy to maintain scripts) text processing language if you do a lot of Japanese information processing. For some Ruby or JPerl may be a good alternative to Perl.

Why do I use Perl? -- Because its is well documented (free manpages, free websites, excellent dead tree books), clpm and Perlmonks, its hard to tell your clients you want to deliver Ruby applications but easy to say Perl is necessary, and while there is a RAA (Ruby Application Archive) cpan is just unbeatable.

I am happy with Perl, and I will be much more happy when Unicode will become a widely used standard. At the moment almost all my files are in sjis, euc-jp or jis. Roundtrip conversion from euc to Unicode and after processing back to euc cost just too much time to allow me using the nice Unicode features for easy text processing.

Hanamaki