Hi,

David Kaiser wrote:
> I'm fairly new to perl, and I have what is surely a basic question. I need
> Perl to handle text with non-English characters, i.e. from Polish, Czech,
> Cyrillic, etc. Do I need to declare a locale to do this? Thanks for your
> help.

The following is only valid for perl 5.6 or later.

Try "perldoc perlunicode" for a starting point.

In brief: Perl can either process strings as streams of bytes/octets or as
streams of characters where a character can be a multi-byte character -
especially a UTF-8 sequence.  You can control that in a very general way with
the pragmas "use utf8" resp. "use bytes", and there is also a UTF-8 flag on
strings that marks them as having character or byte semantics.

On the other hand: For all languages that you have mentioned, you do not
really need Unicode.  Various 8-bit character sets are actually sufficient
for them.  But then, of course, you always have to know the "correct"
character set for your data.

Complicated and confusing, but that's what it is.  By the way,
 is a better list for your question.

Ciao

Guido
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