The Unicode::Normalize might be kind of a sledge hammer for the task that you're talking about. "Normalization" covers the equivalences between single-codepoint "complex" characters, e.g. é (U00C9) and concatentations of "component" characters, e.g. e + ́ (U0045 + U0301) -- this also known as character (de)composition. These issues are especially knotty in some languages, and this is what the Unicode::Normalize module is all about. (Note that the result of Normalization often still consists of wide characters.)

You're task seems more like "replace a wide character whenever there is an obvious ascii substitute", which is much simpler; this could apply to various quotes, brackets and other punctuation as well as spaces and hyphens/dashes. (The use of wide-character "smart quotes" seems to be on the rise).

If you have wide-character spaces in a utf8 string that was decoded from HTML, turning them all into ascii spaces is easy: 

s/\s/ /g;

[download]
(Of course, that will apply to newlines and tabs as well, but with html data, this isn't likely to be a problem.)

As for the various punctuation marks, if you already know which wide characters to expect, just put those into a regex character class: 

my $dashes = join '', map { chr() } ( 0xAD, 0x2010 .. 0x2015, 0xFE63, 
+0xFF0D );
my $squots = join '', map { chr() } ( 0x02BC, 0x2018 .. 0x201B );
my $dquots = join '', map { chr() } ( 0x02EE, 0x201C .. 0x201F );

s/[$dashes]/-/g;
s/[$squots]/'/g;
s/[$dquots]/"/g;

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If you run across any wide characters besides those, you can look them up pretty easily and add to your character classes as needed. Here's a simple script for getting the names of various codepoints, codepoints that match various names, etc.

(update: fixed a typo in the assignment to "$dashes")

In reply to Re: unicode normalization by graff
in thread unicode normalization by mscudder

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