Target Audience:
All Perl programmers, module authors, and XS authors seeking to understand, support or utilize Unicode in their applications or modules. Basic understanding of Perl (opening files, using regular expressions, etc.) required, module authoring and XS experience helpful but optional.

Goal:
Attendees will learn what Unicode is, how it works, and why it is important. They will also learn about and learn how to use Perl's Unicode support in 5.6.x and previous versions, as well as the modules that can help them process Unicode data. Finally, module authors will learn what changes will be required to their modules to support Unicode data.

Tutorial Outline: Preliminaries

What is Unicode, and why should I care?

Unicode UTFs

The Unicode Standard

Perl's Unicode support

Handling legacy/CJKV data

Collation, normalization, locales

Modules for Unicode manipulation

XS authors' needs and Perl's internal Unicode handling