Item Description: creates encoding functions from UTF-8 to most encodings

Review Synopsis: Alpha module that will be probably replaced by native Perl functions in the future. It can save your day in the meantime

Description

The XML::UM module uses the maps that come with XML::Encoding to perform the reverse operation. It creates mapping routines that encode a UTF-8 string in the chosen encoding.

This module comes in handy when processing XML, as XML::Parser converts all strings to UTF-8.

A typical usage scenario would be:

  # create the encoding routine (only once!)
  $encode= XML::UM::get_encode(Encoding => 'big5');
  ...
  # convert a utf8 string to the desired encoding
  $encoded_string= $encode($utf8_string);
[download]

Warning: the version of XML::UM in libxml-enno-1.02 has an installation problem. To fix this, once you have downloaded and uncompressed the module, before doing perl Makefile.PL, edit the XML::UM.pm file in the lib/XML directory and replace the $ENCDIR value with the location of your XML::Encoding maps (it should be /usr/local/src/XML-Encoding-1.01/maps or /opt/src/XML-Encoding-1.01/maps/).

Why use XML::UM?

• it works!
• it might be the only easy solution for you

Why NOT use XML::UM?

• it's slow
• it cannot deal with latin-1
• you can wait for the new Unicode features in Perl

Personal comments

XML::UM is probably just an interim solution while the new Unicode features in Perl are being developed. They will essentially perform the same tasks, just faster and in the Perl core (which means more support)

In the meantime XML::UM is easy to use and can really save you some headaches with encodings.

The absence of latin-1 conversion function (due to the fact that expat supports latin-1 natively, hence there is no encoding table for it in XML:Encoding) is a big flaw though.

It would be real nice if someone would pick up the module and add latin1. Recoding it in C could help too.