SYNOPSIS

use Text::CharWidth qw(mbwidth mbswidth mblen);
mbwidth(string);
mbswidth(string);
mblen(string);

DESCRIPTION

This module supplies features similar as wcwidth(3) and wcswidth(3) in C language.

Characters have its own width on terminal depending on locale. For example, ASCII characters occupy one column per character, east Asian fullwidth characters (like Hiragana or Han Ideograph) occupy two columns per character, and combining characters (apperaring in ISO-8859-11 Thai, Unicode, and so on) occupy zero columns per character. mbwidth() gives the width of the first character of the given string and mbswidth() gives the width of the whole given string.

The names of mbwidth and mbswidth came from ``multibyte'' versions of wcwidth and wcswidth which are ``wide character'' versions.

mblen(string) returns number of bytes of the first character of the string. Please note that a character may consist of multiple bytes in multibyte encodings such as UTF-8, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GB2312, or Big5.

mbwidth(string) returns the width of the first character of the string. mbswidth(string) returns the width of the whole string.

Parameters are to be given in locale encodings, not always in UTF-8.

AUTHOR

Tomohiro KUBOTA, <[email protected]>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2003 by Tomohiro KUBOTA

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.