In many things "hack until it looks OK" is fine. Unicode is one of the exceptions. Get the concepts down first. Juerd did us all a great service with perlunitut and perlunifaq.

Here's a great cheat sheet (also from Juerd): http://juerd.nl/site.plp/perluniadvice.

While striving for Unicode enlightenment, meditate on this mantra: "Decode everything you receive, encode everything you send out. (If it's text data.)" It's not the totality of wisdom, but as its layers of meaning dawn, you will see it contains 90% of what you need to know. And it is a quote from ... what, did you guess Juerd? How'd you know?

In reply to Re: Unicode nightmare: is there a cheat sheet or solutions diagram? by Jeffrey Kegler
in thread Unicode nightmare: is there a cheat sheet or solutions diagram? by rduke15

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.