Text::CharWidth version 0.02 ============================ This is a module to provide equivalent feature as wcwidth(3) and wcswidth(3). This also provides mblen(3) equivalent subroutine. mbwidth() and mbswidth() are provided subroutines corresponding wcwidth(3) and wcswidth(3) in C language. The prefix "mb" expresses that they handles "multibyte character" in C meaning, i.e., character encoding specified by LC_CTYPE locale. These subroutines are used to get the width of characters on terminal. Though most characters have width of 1, there are exceptions. Fullwidth characters are characters with width of 2. Most of east Asian characters such as Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Han Ideogram are fullwidth. Combining characters are characters with width of 0. Unicode has many combining characters like diacritical marks. There are languages which need combining characters such as Thai and Vietnamese. Thus, if you would like to format international texts on terminal, you will have to be aware of variation of character width and will want to use this module. mblen() returns the number of bytes for the first character of the given string. In 8bit character encodings, it is always 1. However, in multibyte encodings, this may be more than 1. The parameter is given in locale encoding, not UTF-8 string. (Of course locale encoding is UTF-8 in UTF-8 locales.) Prerequisites ------------- This module requires your system to have wcwidth(), wcswidth(), and mblen() functions which are complian with the Single Unix Specification. Build and Install ----------------- Please use standard way to build and install this module: perl Makefile.PL make make install COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE --------------------- Copyright (C) 2003 Tomohiro KUBOTA This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.