printing multibyte chars

Deda has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

hello monks, I found some nodes on multibyte regexes, but none on printing. I have the following regex, that describes the Shift-JIS encoding (from http://www.perl.org/tpc/1998/User_Applications/Perl%20and%20Multiple-byte%20Char/perl2-lunde-paper.pdf)

$sjis= q{ # Shift-JIS encoding
  <[0-9A-F][0-9A-F][0-9A-F][0-9A-F]>                                  
+      # CDPS Unicode tag
  | &\#x[0-9A-F][0-9A-F][0-9A-F][0-9A-F];                             
+       # SGML Unicode tag
  | [\x00-\x7F]                                                       
+             # ASCII
  | [\x81-\x9F\xE0-\xFC][\x40-\x7E\x80-\xFC]                          
+      # Two-byte range
  | [\xA0-\xDF]                                                       
+             # Half-width katakana
};
[download]

My goal is to create a random string from this (or any other) regex. I got through the parsing part but am now stuck with the correct byte sequences. In e.g. \x83\xE3 and \x44\x81 are 2 correct 2-byte characters (from rule [\x81-\x9F\xE0-\xFC][\x40-\x7E\x80-\xFC]). The problem is: how do I print them - i can print byte by byte, but that does not give the correct results. To sum up: i have the correct byte sequence, i know which bytes "go together", i just don't know how to print the multibyte chars. Appreciate your aid, Deda.

Comment on printing multibyte chars Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: printing multibyte chars by Roger (Parson) on Oct 03, 2003 at 14:29 UTC
Go and have a look at the String::Multibyte module from CPAN. It has everything you need to print and manipulate the multibype strings. (You should always check CPAN first to see if there is already a module that does what you want.)	[reply]
Re: Re: printing multibyte chars by Deda (Novice) on Oct 06, 2003 at 07:53 UTC
(You're right. I should have learned by now, that everything i try to do has most likely been done in a CPAN module:).)	[reply]