How has support for unicode and regex changed across recent Perl versions?

Perl has seen significant enhancements in its support for Unicode and regular expressions (regex) in recent versions. The evolution of these features allows for better text handling, multilingual support, and improved pattern matching capabilities. Below are some key changes in Unicode and regex implementations in recent Perl releases:

  • Perl 5.8: Introduction of the utf8 pragma, which allowed for handling UTF-8 encoded strings, enhancing support for internationalization.
  • Perl 5.14: Added support for the Unicode 6.1 standard, which expanded the character set and introduced several new character properties.
  • Perl 5.24: Improved regex performance with Unicode matches, offering optimized handling of complex character properties.
  • Perl 5.26: Enhanced the ability to work with Unicode in regex syntax, making it easier to match complex scripts and patterns.
  • Perl 5.32: Further improvements in Unicode handling in regex, including better support for new Unicode features and performance optimizations.

The following example demonstrates how to use Unicode characters in regex matching within Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use utf8; my $text = "Café - welcome to the world of Unicode!"; if ($text =~ /Caf[ée]{1}/) { print "Match found: $text\n"; } else { print "No match found.\n"; }

Unicode regex Perl versions regex matching utf8 pragma character properties