How has support for handling emojis changed across recent Perl versions?

Support for handling emojis in Perl has improved significantly across recent versions. Starting from Perl 5.8, with the introduction of Unicode support, developers were able to work with emoji characters, but the experience was not always straightforward. As of Perl 5.26 and onwards, Unicode handling has become more robust and user-friendly, allowing developers to manipulate emojis without encountering unexpected issues.

With the introduction of `utf8`, `unicode_strings`, and `use open ':std', ':utf8';`, managing UTF-8 strings (including emojis) has been simplified. These enhancements enable better handling of a wide range of Unicode characters, including emojis, making it easier for developers to incorporate them into their applications.

Here's an example demonstrating how to print emojis in a Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use utf8; # Enables UTF-8 in script use open ':std', ':utf8'; # Make standard input/output UTF-8 my $emoji = "\x{1F600}"; # Smiling Face emoji print "Hello, World! $emoji\n";

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