I was able to hit on a solution to the first question with some help from Google.

This test code works well, although I confess that I don't fully yet understand the codepoint_hex method that gets me the code point I need: 
while($testStr =~ m/(.)/g) {
    $string = pad(codepoint_hex($1)); 
    print("$string\n");
    print charnames::viacode($string) . "\n";
}


sub codepoint_hex {
    if (my $char = shift) {
        return sprintf '%2.2x', unpack('U0U*', $char);
    }
}

sub pad {
    my $str = shift;
    while (length $str < 4)    {
        $str = "0$str";
    }
    return "0x$str";
}

[download]
Result:
0x03bb
GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA
0x03b1
GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
0x1f78
GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA
0x03c2
GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA


Jason

In reply to Re: getting Unicode character names from string by csthflk
in thread getting Unicode character names from string by csthflk

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