Dear Monks,
A lot of unicode beginners believe that Unicode characters and UTF-8 characters are the same thing. If they delve into the subject a little further, it becomes patently obvious that a Unicode character and a UTF-8 character are not the same thing. In fact, you soon learn that you have to encode a Unicode character with a "UTF-8 translator" to produce a UTF-8 character.
Some time after acquiring such powerful knowledge, a beginner might even attempt to read the unicode docs, like perlunicode, to get clarification on an issue, but then come across statements like this:
Regular Expressions
The regular expression compiler produces polymorphic opcodes. That
is, the pattern adapts to the data and automatically switches to
the Unicode character scheme when presented with data that is
internally encoded in UTF-8 -- or instead uses a traditional byte
scheme when presented with byte data.
The fact of the matter is, if the pattern switched to the Unicode character scheme then the pattern couldn't possibly match a single character in a UTF-8 string.
I think it would be nice if the person who wrote the perlunicode docs had adhered to the basic tenants of unicode when describing perl's state of unicode awareness. Or, was the idea to dumb down the docs and present factually incorrect descriptions so that beginners who think that Unicode characters are the same as UTF-8 characters are not confused?
In reply to perl unicode docs by 7stud
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