The numbers on graph means: length of bar – monthly salary in polish złoty (currency) – divde by 4 to get values in Euro, percentage in pink box – percentage of that language users (perl – 5%)

See also:

1. Perl as good as java, python and PHP way above
2. Perl, PHP, corporate – continued.
3. Perl 5.10.1

This seemingly off-topic introduction leads to the on-topic perl thing: the mason. It is a “High-performance, dynamic web site authoring system” and “solves the common problems of site development: caching, debugging, templating, maintaining development and production sites, and more.” and “you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages from shared, reusable components.”. Well, sound nice. How it looks? Like this:

(there was something wrong here. I removed it )

Sadly, the FAQ on the official page seems to be neglected and is spammed by merchants of medications made to make your weenie harder. On the other hand, newest version is 1.44 form Jan 4, 2010 - so it is still developed.

Assuming that I would like to learn something new, like "something big, modern, to easy make web applications - with templates, cache, scalability, quick development" should I dive into mason, or better look for something else?

So, I have question, asking YOU for an insight about this like:
- mason is cool, and at least better to do the same by your own from scratch
- forget it, it is so 1990's, learn catalyst instead
- forget mason and catalyst, learn PHP symphony (- no problem for me, I know PHP - more or less )
- ruby on rails is the real thing (no, I will not learn ruby - at least now )
- the best is framework .... (something not mentioned above)

Please write your opinion below. Thank you.

See also:

1. Website login with Perl
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – dbi, mysql

use Image::Resize;
use autodie;

$src = "bigimage.jpg";
my $old = Image::Resize->new($src);
my $new = $old->resize(200, 300); # max dimensions

$jpegdata = $new->jpeg(95); # jpeg quality

open OUT, ">./smaller/$src";
print OUT $jpegdata;
close OUT;

See also:

1. installing from CPAN without root
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – dbi, mysql
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – binmode, charset

Waht is new in perl 5.11.3?

• Perl is shipped with Unicode version 5.2, itself released in October 2009.
• Perl can now handle every Unicode character property.
• The experimental ‘legacy’ pragma, introduced with Perl 5.11.2 has been removed. Its functionality has been replaced with the ‘feature’ pragma.
• Numerous CPAN “toolchain” modules have been updated to what we hope are the final release versions for Perl 5.12.0.
• Many crashing bugs or regressions from earlier releases of Perl were fixed for this release.
  

In my opinion is is very good, that perl 5 is still developed, as version 6 have still a long way to go, before it may be used (first, by enthusiasts, then by  coders, next by big companies that need reliability and stability)

See also:

1. Perl WTFs – last in function
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)
3. Inevitable parrot 2

http://rishida.net/tools/conversion/

Ok, it is not strictly related to perl , but I guess it may be handy for people that were interested in the “utf at LAMP horror” cycle.

See also:

1. Utf8 horror at LAMP – accept charset
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – part 2 – Encode

<form method=”post” accept-charset=”utf-8″ action=”…”>

Well, I never used it… and my web app works.

Is this accept-charset really needed? Do you know?

See also:

1. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – binmode, charset
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – dbi, mysql
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)

We need to take care of  mysql connection, so it is ut8 – ready:

if (my $dbh = DBI->connect(“DBI:mysql:database=”.$name.’;host=’.$hostname, $user, $password,
{
RaiseError        => $raise,
#             AutoCommit        => 1,
mysql_enable_utf8 => 1,
on_connect_do => [ "SET NAMES 'utf8'", "SET CHARACTER SET +'utf8'" ],
})) {

$dbh->{‘mysql_enable_utf8′} = 1;
return $dbh; # DBI database handler
}

We also must make sure that our tables are unicode:

CREATE TABLE `foo` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
….

)  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

And remember, that utf8 chars may take more space than normal – so prepare longer varchars in tables and be prepared for problem with indexes, like this: Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes – see http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=4541

See also:

1. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – part 2 – Encode
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – binmode, charset

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>
…
…
…
</head>
<body>

and/or:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Second step, is to set binmode on STDOUT (if we print our dynamically generated webpages)

binmode STDOUT, “:utf8″;

to get rid of

Wide character in print at …

warnings.

See also:

1. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)
2. Utf8 horror at LAMP – accept charset
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – part 2 – Encode

Here is how to change binary data to text strings:

use Encode ;
$foo = Encode::decode_utf8($foo);

you can also convert from other encodings:
$data = decode(“iso-8859-2″, $data);

To check whether a string have utf flag turned on:

use Encode qw(is_utf8);
print is_utf8($foo) ? “utf8″ : “not utf8″

If you do not know what encoding is the data, use perl module:
use Encode::Guess;
my $enc = guess_encoding($data, qw/euc-jp shiftjis 7bit-jis/);

You need to tell explicitly which encodings are suspected, because
by default, it checks only ascii, utf8 and UTF-16/32 with BOM.

Encode::Guess->set_suspects(qw/euc-jp shiftjis 7bit-jis/);

But remember, that the guessing is not magic, and it likely to fail.
For example it may fail to recognize whether data are in is-8859-1 or iso-8859-2
Because:

The reason is that Encode::Guess guesses encoding by trial and error. It first splits $data into lines and tries to decode the line for each suspect. It keeps it going until all but one encoding is eliminated out of suspects list. ISO-8859 series is just too successful for most cases (because it fills almost all code points in \x00-\xff).

See also:

1. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – binmode, charset
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – dbi, mysql

We need to take care of source code encoding, web forms data – inputed by user -  encoding, mysql encoding, displaying data (writing) encoding, and perhaps also take care of data taken from disk files.

First, we need to take care of source code, if we want to write there something like

$var = “zażółć gęślą jaźń”

we need  to use utf8

The use utf8 pragma tells the Perl parser to allow UTF-8 in the program text in the current lexical scope

Do not use this pragma for anything else than telling Perl that your script is written in UTF-8.

use utf8 is not a magical trick to fix all problems with utf8, just a beginning of the journey…

We must have a good code editor or IDE that understands utf8. It will be also nice to have possibility to open files with other other encodings and convert them to utf8. For unix/linux there is for example KDevelop, and many other tools. For windows, there are many editors too. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors#Unicode_and_other_character_encodings and http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors.html

When using use utf8 remember to save code in utf8 encoding!

To be continued…

See also:

1. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – part 2 – Encode
2. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – binmode, charset
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – dbi, mysql