NAME

Text::Striphigh - Perl extension to strip the high bit off of ISO-8859-1 text.

SYNOPSIS

  use Text::Striphigh 'striphigh'

  $SevenBitsText = striphigh($TextContainingEightBitCharacters);

DESCRIPTION

The Text::Striphigh module exports a single function: "striphigh". This function takes one argument, a string possibly containing high ASCII characters in the ISO-8859-1 character set, and transforms this into a string containing only 7 bits ASCII characters, by substituting every high bit character with a similar looking standard ASCII character, or with a sequence of standard ASCII characters.

Because of precisely the deficiency this package tries to offer a workaround for is present in some of the things that process pod, there are no examples in this manpage. Look at the source or the test script if you want examples.

MAINTENANCE

If you ever want to change the striphigh function yourself, then don't change the one containing the mile long "tr{}{}" statement that you see at first, change the one behind the "__DATA__" that's a lot more readable.

After you've done that, simply run the "Striphigh.pm" file through perl to generate a new version of the first routine, and in fact of the entire file, something like this:

 perl -w Striphigh.pm > Striphigh.pm.new
 mv Striphigh.pm.new Striphigh.pm

BUGS

Assumes the input text is ISO-8859-1, without even looking at the LOCALE settings.

Some translations are probably less than optimal.

People will be offended if you run their names through this function, and print the result on an envelope using an outdated printing device. However, it's probably better than having that printer print a name with a high ASCII character in it which happens to be the command to set the printer on fire.

AUTHOR

Jan-Pieter Cornet <johnpc@xs4all.nl>