$line is still encoded. A character won't match the UTF-8 encoding of that character unless it's an ASCII character.

While that may be an accurate statement, trying to decipher what it means is not easy.

Here is how I would put it: a unicode character is not the same as a unicode character encoded in UTF-8. There are many encodings, and UTF-8 is only one of them. However, there is only one unicode character for the copyright symbol. Simply put, if you want to match UTF-8 characters in a string, then you need to use UTF-8 characters in your substitution--not unicode characters.

Here is a code example:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Encode;

my $unicode_str = "\x{00a9}";
my $utf8_str = encode('utf-8', $unicode_str);
say $utf8_str;  #copyright symbol

my $line = "$utf8_str hello world";
$line =~ s/$utf8_str/\\textcopyright/;
say $line;   #\textcopyright hello world

#Or you can just start with the UTF-8 character
#for the copyright symbol:

$line = "\xC2\xA9 hello world";
say $line;   #copyright symbol followed by 'hello world'
$line =~ s/\xC2\xA9/\\textcopyright/;
say $line;  #\textcopyright hello world

[download]

In my opinion, the easiest way to understand the whole unicode thing is this: a unicode escape sequence is an integer. An 'encoding' converts a unicode integer into a character. An encoding is just a list that looks like this:

1 => chinese character for the new year
2 => japanese character for fish
3 => happy face
...
...
60,000 => mongolian character for beef 
...

[download]

So an encoding takes unicode integers and translates them into characters. Different encodings translate the unicode integers into different characters. UTF-8 is just one encoding, which is very popular.

In reply to Re: Search & replace of UTF-8 characters ? by 7stud
in thread Search & replace of UTF-8 characters ? by levien

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