It replaces every character in that character class (basically: the unusual ASCII control characters, plus anything outside ASCII) with:

  1. opening square bracket, followed by
  2. capital letter "U", followed by
  3. plus sign, followed by
  4. the numeric value of character being replaced, in uppercase hexadecimal, padded to a minimum of four digits, followed by
  5. closing square bracket

It's a regular expression I use quite... regularly. It makes any non-ASCII characters stick out like a sore thumb, so you can see exactly what characters are in your string.

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^6: converting smart quotes by tobyink
in thread converting smart quotes by slugger415

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