Re: strange effect with [:lower:] in perl

From: Alan J. Flavell (flavell_at_ph.gla.ac.uk)
Date: 10/28/03 

Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 18:46:30 +0000

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Abigail wrote:

> "" > [a-z0-9] # Lowercase letters *and* digits.
> ""
> "" Surely that only refers to a subset of what Unicode considers to be
> "" "letters"?
>
> Yeah, but that's what [:lower:] seems to do too:
>
> $ perl -wle 'for (0x00 .. 0x80) {

Surely you meant to set the limit at 0xff or so for this
demonstration?

> printf "%02x %s\n", $_, chr if chr () =~ /[[:lower:]]/}'

[snip]

> No lowercase accented letters here.

Curious. No surprise when the limit's set at 0x80, as I'm sure you'd
agree; but I must admit I was surprised at the accented lower-case
letters up to 0xff not being counted, despite the accented lower case
letters above 0x100 being counted. Prima facie I think there's
something wrong here, no? (This is perl 5.8.0 per RedHat 9).

If I set the upper limit at, say, 0xfff, then I get lots of lower-case
letters reported in the blocks of extended Latin, Greek, Coptic,
Cyrillic and Armenian.

And there are more still, e.g 0x2149 "DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL J"
;-)

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