PERLJP(1perl)

📦
version 5.44.0 · 2 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 NAME 💖

okay so bestie 🫶 say hello to perljp — it's the 日本語 Perl ガイド, the Japanese Perl guide, and it lives inside the Perl Programmers Reference Guide (yes, the <1perl> manual section). iconic behavior only. 👑

🌸 説明 (DESCRIPTION) 🌸

Welcome to the Perl world! 🌈

Starting from Perl 5.8.0, Unicode support got massively leveled up, and because of that, support for character encodings other than Latin ones — CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Hangul) included — got added. Unicode is the standard that aims to handle every character in the entire world with one single encoding, and it's already got everything from East to West, plus everything in between (Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, etc. etc.), and on top of that, the encodings OS vendors used to define all by themselves (PC and Macintosh). 🦋

Perl itself runs in Unicode, periodt. String literals and regexes inside Perl scripts assume Unicode. And for input/output, the module that handles all the various encodings we've been using all along — Encode — comes standard, so converting between Unicode and those encodings is literally easy now. 💅

Right now, the encodings Encode supports are these:

7bit-jis            AdobeStandardEncoding AdobeSymbol         AdobeZdingbat
ascii               big5                big5-hkscs          cp1006
cp1026              cp1047              cp1250              cp1251
cp1252              cp1253              cp1254              cp1255
cp1256              cp1257              cp1258              cp37
cp424               cp437               cp500               cp737
cp775               cp850               cp852               cp855
cp856               cp857               cp860               cp861
cp862               cp863               cp864               cp865
cp866               cp869               cp874               cp875
cp932               cp936               cp949               cp950
dingbats            euc-cn              euc-jp              euc-kr
gb12345-raw         gb2312-raw          gsm0338             hp-roman8
hz                  iso-2022-jp         iso-2022-jp-1       iso-8859-1
iso-8859-10         iso-8859-11         iso-8859-13         iso-8859-14
iso-8859-15         iso-8859-16         iso-8859-2          iso-8859-3
iso-8859-4          iso-8859-5          iso-8859-6          iso-8859-7
iso-8859-8          iso-8859-9          iso-ir-165          jis0201-raw
jis0208-raw         jis0212-raw         johab               koi8-f
koi8-r              koi8-u              ksc5601-raw         MacArabic
MacCentralEurRoman  MacChineseSimp      MacChineseTrad      MacCroatian
MacCyrillic         MacDingbats         MacFarsi            MacGreek
MacHebrew           MacIcelandic        MacJapanese         MacKorean
MacRoman            MacRomanian         MacRumanian         MacSami
MacSymbol           MacThai             MacTurkish          MacUkrainian
nextstep            posix-bc            shiftjis            symbol
UCS-2BE             UCS-2LE             UTF-16              UTF-16BE
UTF-16LE            UTF-32              UTF-32BE            UTF-32LE
utf8                viscii

(114 kinds in total. 全114種類. not a single one missing, we counted. 😤)

So for example, to convert a file in the character encoding FOO to UTF-8, you go like this:

perl -Mencoding=FOO,STDOUT,utf8 -pe1 < file.FOO > file.utf8

Also, Perl ships with piconv, a character encoding conversion utility written entirely in Perl, so you can do it this way too:

piconv -f FOO -t utf8 < file.FOO > file.utf8
piconv -f utf8 -t FOO < file.utf8 > file.FOO

🧚 (jcode.pl|Jcode.pm|JPerl) からの移行 🧚

Before 5.8, if your script was in EUC-JP you could at least handle the literals. And as for modules that handle I/O, there was Jcode.pm (<http://openlab.ring.gr.jp/Jcode/>), and as a utility for perl4 there was jcode.pl, and honestly not a few of you probably know how much those two got used in Japanese-capable CGI. That said — handling Japanese regexes properly was straight-up impossible. 💀

Before 5.005, Perl had a Japanese-specialized localized version: Jperl (<http://homepage2.nifty.com/kipp/perl/jperl/index.html> ※1). There was also MacJPerl, a Japanese version of MacPerl, the Perl for Mac OS 9.x/Classic (<https://habilis.net/macjperl/>). With those, you could handle Shift_JIS as-is on top of EUC-JP as an encoding, and you could also handle Japanese regexes. 🔥

In Perl 5.8, all of these features are achievable with the Perl core alone, and not just Japanese — all 114 of the encodings above, and simultaneously, too. And on top of that, grabbing new modules for new encodings from CPAN and such is easy now. 🎀

※1: it's currently unavailable because the hosting service ended. You can get a Windows binary from Vector (<https://www.vector.co.jp/soft/win95/util/se098198.html>), and the perl4 patch from CPAN (<https://www.cpan.org/src/unsupported/4.036/jperl/>).
  • 入出力 (I/O) — every single example below takes Shift_JIS input and converts it to EUC-JP for output:
# jcode.pl
require "jcode.pl";
while(<>){
  jcode::convert(*_, 'euc', 'sjis');
  print;
}
# Jcode.pm
use Jcode;
while(<>){
      print Jcode->new($_, 'sjis')->euc;
}
# Perl 5.8
use Encode;
while(<>){
  from_to($_, 'shiftjis', 'euc-jp');
  print;
}
# Perl 5.8 - encoding を利用して
use encoding 'euc-jp', STDIN => 'shiftjis';
while(<>){
      print;
}
  • Jperl 互換スクリプト (Jperl-compatible scripts) — you literally just change the so-called "shebang" and most Jperl scripts should be usable with no changes at all. bestie that's the whole trick. 😌
#!/path/to/jperl
↓
#!/path/to/perl -Mencoding=euc-jp

For the details, go read perldoc encoding. 📖

📚 さらに詳しく 📚

Perl ships with an enormous pile of documentation, and it covers Perl's new features, Unicode support, and how to use the Encode module, all in fine detail (sadly it's mostly in English though 😭). You can read some of it with the following commands:

perldoc perlunicode # PerlのUnicodeサポート全般
perldoc Encode      # Encodeモジュールに関して
perldoc Encode::JP  # うち日本語文字コードに関して

(that's the general Perl Unicode support story, then the Encode module itself, then the Japanese character encoding part of it — in that order, iykyk ✨)

🌐 Perl全般に関する URL 🌐

📖 Perlの修得に役立つ URL 📖

🫶 Perl に関する団体 🫶

🦄 Unicode関連のURL 🦄

👑 AUTHORS 👑

  • Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi> 💖
  • Dan Kogai (小飼 弾) <dankogai@dan.co.jp> ✨
  • Shogo Ichinose (一野瀬 翔吾) <shogo82148@gmail.com> 🌸

and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this one's PERLJP(1perl) — perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and it comes to you straight from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide. go forth and encode responsibly. 💅🦋

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