[OAI-implementers] character vs entity references

[Ed Summers]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 09:58:55AM -0500, Todd White wrote:
> $string =~ tr/\0-\x{ff}//UC;

Search for tr/ in the following pages for some fun Perl archaeology. 

    http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.005_03/pod/perlop.html
    http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6.0/pod/perlop.html
    http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/perlop.html

You can see the UC modifiers were introduced in 5.6.0 and quickly 
dropped in 5.6.1 (and in versions thereafter). 5.6.0 is a notoriously
buggy release, I think in part because of it's UTF8 handling. These
problems have been fixed in versions >= 5.8.0, which is the first
recommended release of Perl for safely working with UTF8.

Funny, I always thought Perl held backwards compatability sacrosanct...
not including Perl6 of course :) 

You might be interested in this list for Perl library folks: 
http://perl4lib.perl.org for discussion of Perl esoterica and more.

//Ed