NAME
    Perl6::Str - Grapheme level string implementation for Perl 5

SYNOPSIS
        use Perl6::Str;
        use charnames qw(:full);
        my $s = Perl6::Str->new("a\N{COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT}");
        my $other = "\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE}";

        if ($s eq $other) {
            print "Equality compared at grapheme level\n";
        }

        # just one grapheme:
        printf "'%s' has %d logical characters\n", $s, $s->graphs;

        # prints the whole grapheme, not just the accent:
        print $s->substr(-1, 1); 
        print $s->uc;

        # adjust case of characters according to template:
        # prints 'AbcDE'
        print $s->new('abcdE')->samecase('Xy Z');

DESCRIPTION
    Perl 5 offers string manipulation at the byte level (for non-upgraded
    strings) and at the codepoint level (for decoded strings). However it
    fails to provide string manipulation at the grapheme level, that is it
    has no easy way of treating a sequence of codepoints, in which all but
    the first are combining characters (like accents, for example) as one
    character.

    "Perl6::Str" tries to solve this problem by introducing a string object
    with an API similar to that of Perl 6 (as far as possible), and
    emulating common operations such as "substr", "chomp" and "chop" at the
    grapheme level. It also introduces builtin string methods found in Perl
    6 such as "samecase".

    "Perl6::Str" is written in pure perl 5.

CAVEATS
    "Perl6::Str" is implemented in terms of a blessed reference to the
    underlying perl 5 string, and all operations are either overloaded
    operators or method calls. That means that the objects loose all their
    magic once they are interpolated into ordinary strings, and that all
    overloaded operations come with a speed penalty.

    Also note that it's another layer of abstraction, and as such suffers a
    speed limit for all operations. If speed is important to you, benchmark
    this module before you use it (and tell me your results please); if it's
    too slow, consider writing a C based version of it.

METHODS
    All methods that expect numbers as input (like "substr") count them as
    graphemes, not as codepoints or bytes.

    new
      "Perl6::Str-"new($p5_str)> takes a Perl 5 string, and returns a
      "Perl6::Str" object. You can also use "new" as an object method,
      "$p6s-"new($other)>. Note that the given perl 5 string should be a
      decoded text string.

    graphs
      "$s->graphs" returns the number of graphemes in $s. If you think
      "length", think "graphs" instead.

    codes
      "$s->codes" returns the number of codepoints in $s.

    bytes
      "$s->bytes" returns the number of bytes of the NFKC-normalized and
      UTF-8 encoded $s. This is subject to change.

    chars
      returns the number of characters in the currently chosen Unicode
      level. At the moment only grapheme-level is implemented, it's
      currently an alias to "graphs".

    substr

      $s->substr(OFFSET)
      $s->substr(OFFEST, LENGTH)
      $s->substr(OFFSET, LENGHT, REPLACEMENT)

      does the same thing as the builtin "substr" function

    uc
    lc
    ucfirst
    lcfirst
      do the same things as the corresponding builtin functions.

    capitalize
      returns a lower case copy of the string with each first character in a
      word as upper case.

    samecase
      "$s->samecase($pattern)" returns a copy of $s with the case
      information as pattern, copied on a grapheme-by-grapheme base. If $s
      is longer than $pattern, the case information from the last grapheme
      of $pattern is copied to the remaining characters of $s.

      Characters without case information (like spaces and digits) leave the
      string unmodified.

    chop
      "$s->chop" returns a copy of $s with the last grapheme removed

    chomp
      "$s->chomp" returns a copy of $s, with the contents of $/ stripped
      from the end of $s.

    reverse
      returns a reversed copy of the string.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
    Copyright (C) 2008 by Moritz A. Lenz. This module is free software. You
    may use, redistribute and modify it under the same terms as perl itself.

    Example code included in this package may be used as if it were Public
    Domain.

AUTHOR
    Moritz Lenz, moritz@faui2k3.org, <http://perlgeek.de/>,
    <http://perl-6.de/>

DEVELOPMENT
    You can obtain the latest development version via subversion:

        svn co https://faui2k3.org/svn/moritz/cpan/Perl6-Str/

