I received a number of helpful suggestions and solutions. The approach I
decided to adopt in my larger script is to 'decode' all the incoming form input
as UTF-8 as well as the input from the database that I'll be matching the form
input against. This seems to allow the '\p{M}' syntax to work as expected in a
Perl regexp. In my test.cgi script for form input it would like like this:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use CGI;
use Encode;
my $query = CGI::new();
my $search_term = decode('UTF-8',$query->param('text'));
my $sans_diacritics = $search_term;
$sans_diacritics =~ s/\pM*//g;
print qq(Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
search_term is $search_term
sans_diacritics is $sans_diacritics
);
exit(0);
I'm slowly figuring out how to work with Unicode in my web scripts, but still
have a lot to learn. Thanks for all the help. :-)
-- Michael
# Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
# University of Texas at Arlington
# 817-272-5326 office
# 817-688-1926 mobile
# [EMAIL PROTECTED]
# http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doran, Michael D [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 7:27 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: Perl4lib
> Subject: Stripping out Unicode combining characters (diacritics)
>
> I'm trying to strip out combining diacritics from some form
> input using this code:
>
> <head>
> <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
> charset=UTF-8"> </head> <body>
> <form action="test.cgi" accept-charset="UTF-8" method="get">
> <input type="text" name="text" value="" size="10">
> <input type="submit" value="submit">
> </form>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> #!/usr/local/bin/perl
> use CGI;
> $query = CGI::new();
> $search_term = $query->param('text');
> $sans_diacritics = $search_term;
> $sans_diacritics =~ s/\p{M}*//g;
> #$sans_diacritics =~ s/o//g;
> print qq(Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> $sans_diacritics
> );
> exit(0);
>
>
> In the form, I'm inputting the string "BartoĢk" with the
> accented character being a base character (small Latin letter
> "o") followed by a combining acute accent. However, when I
> print (to the web) $sans_diacritics, I get my input with no
> change -- the combining diacritic is still there. I know
> that my input is not a precomposed accented character,
> because I can strip out the base "o" and the combining accent
> either stands alone or jumps to another character [2].
>
> The "\p{M}" is a Unicode class name for the character class
> of Unicode 'marks', for example accent marks [1]. I've tried
> these variations (and many others) and none seem to be doing
> what I want:
>
> $sans_diacritics =~ s#[\p{Mark}]*##g;
> $sans_diacritics =~ tr#[\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}]##;
> $sans_diacritics =~ tr#[\p{M}]##;
> $sans_diacritics =~ s/\p{M}*//g;
> $sans_diacritics =~ s#[\p{M}]##g;
> $sans_diacritics =~ s#\x{0301}##g;
> $sans_diacritics =~ s#\x{006F}\x{0301}##g;
> $sans_diacritics =~ s#[\x{0300}-\x{036F}]*##g;
>
> I'm pulling my hair out on this... so any help would be
> appreciated. If there's any other info I can provide, let me know.
>
> My Perl version is 5.8.8 and the script is running on a
> server running Solaris 9.
>
> -- Michael
>
> [1] per http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html and other documentation
>
> [2] using $sans_diacritics =~ s/o//g;
>
> # Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
> # University of Texas at Arlington
> # 817-272-5326 office
> # 817-688-1926 mobile
> # [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> # http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
>
