#!/usr/bin/perl

=head1 NAME

uhead -- unicode-aware version of unix "head"

=head1 SYNOPSIS

uhead -c N [file ...]   show first N unicode chars from file(s)

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This does what the standard "head -c N" command (GNU version) would do
(i.e. show the first N characters from one or more files), with just
the following differences:

=over 4

=item *

The "-c N" option is required (not optional)

=item *

N refers to a number of UTF-8 encoded unicode characters rather than
bytes

=item *

"Negative" values for N are not supported (you cannot elect to view
all but the last N characters)

=back

If no files are provided on the command line, it will read from STDIN
instead. (But if it notices that STDIN is actually the user's tty, not
a pipe or redirection from a file, it will exit with a suitable error
message.)

=head1 AUTHOR

David Graff <graff(at)ldc.upenn.edu>

=cut

use strict;

my $Usage = "Usage: $0 -c N [file ...]\n";
die $Usage unless ( @ARGV > 1 and $ARGV[0] eq '-c' and
                    $ARGV[1] =~ /^\d+$/ );

shift;
my $show_chrs = shift;
if ( -t ) {
    @ARGV or die "You need to provide some data (pipe or file(s))\n$Us
+age";
}
else {
    @ARGV = ( '__STDIN__' );
}

binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
my $nfiles = @ARGV;

while ( @ARGV ) {
    my $file = shift;
    my $head;
    if ( $file eq '__STDIN__' ) {
        binmode STDIN, ":utf8";
        read STDIN, $head, $show_chrs;
    }
    else {
        if ( open( I, "<:utf8", $file )) {
            read I, $head, $show_chrs;
        }
        else {
            warn "open failed on $file\n";
            next;
        }
    }
    print "\n==> $file <==\n" if ( $nfiles > 1 );
    print $head,"\n";
}

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In reply to uhead: "head -c" for utf8 data by graff

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