README for Text::Unidecode Time-stamp: "2001-07-14 02:03:33 MDT" Text::Unidecode NAME Text::Unidecode -- US-ASCII transliterations of Unicode text SYNOPSIS use utf8; use Text::Unidecode; print unidecode( "\x{5317}\x{4EB0}\n" # those are the Chinese characters for Beijing ); # That prints: Bei Jing DESCRIPTION It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need aren't accessible. You could represent the Unicode characters as "???????" or "\15BA\15A0\1610...", but that's nearly useless to the user who actually wants to read what the text says. What Text::Unidecode provides is a function, `unidecode(...)' that takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in US-ASCII characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F). The representation is almost always an attempt at *transliteration* -- i.e., conveying, in Roman letters, the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system. (See the example in the synopsis.) See the POD for more information. REQUIREMENTS This module requires Perl 5.6.0 or higher. (Earlier Perls apparently lack the "use utf8" pragma that Text::Unidecode needs.) I have also observed that 5.6.0's Unicode support is shakey; strongly consider upgrading to 5.6.1 at least. INSTALLATION You install Text::Unidecode, as you would install any perl module library, by running these commands: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install If you want to install a private copy of Text::Unidecode in your home directory, then you should try to produce the initial Makefile with something like this command: perl Makefile.PL LIB=~/perl See perldoc perlmodinstall for more information on installing modules. DOCUMENTATION POD-format documentation is included in Unidecode.pm. POD is readable with the 'perldoc' utility. See ChangeLog for recent changes. SUPPORT Questions, bug reports, useful code bits, and suggestions for Text::Unidecode should just be sent to me at sburke@cpan.org AVAILABILITY The latest version of Text::Unidecode is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). Visit to find a CPAN site near you. COPYRIGHT Copyright 2001, Sean M. Burke , all rights reserved. The programs and documentation in this dist are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.