rupee

Author: szabgab

how-to-create-an-indian-rupee-symbol-with-perl-code.tt

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+=title How to create an Indian Rupee symbol with Perl code
+=timestamp 2013-03-16T10:30:02
+=indexes binmode, Unicode, UTF8
+=status show
+=books beginner_book
+=author szabgab
+=index 1
+=archive 1
+=feed 1
+=comments 1
+=social 1
+
+=abstract start
+
+Recently I got an e-mail from one of the readers asking how to create a Indian Rupee symbol with Perl.
+I told him to check <b>what is the Unicode character for the Rupee symbol</b> and then to check
+<b>how to print Unicode characters with Perl</b>.
+
+As this might be interesting to more people, let me show it here.
+
+=abstract end
+
+The first search led me to the Wikipedia page describing the <a
+href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign">Indian Rupee sign</a>.
+
+Apparently there is a <b>Generic Rupee sign</b> U+20A8 <hl>&#8360;</hl> and a specific <b>Indian Rupee sign</b> U+20B9
+<hl>&#8377;</hl>.
+
+If you'd like to print a Unicode character to the screen (standard output or STDOUT), then you need to
+tell Perl to change the encoding of the STDOUT channel to UTF8. You can do this with the <hl>binmode</hl>
+function. (Check out the <a href="http://perldoc.perl.org/perluniintro.html">Unicode intro</a> for further details.)
+
+For the specific code points you'd use the <hl>\x</hl> sign and then put the Hexadecimal values, in our case
+20A8 and 20B9 respectively in curly braces.
+
+<code lang="perl">
+use strict;
+use warnings;
+use 5.010;
+
+binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");
+
+say "\x{20A8}"; # &#8360;
+say "\x{20B9}"; # &#8377;
+</code>
+
+
+Of course if you are creating an HTML page then you'd better iclude the HTML entity representing the same character
+whith is an at sign (&) followed by a pound sign (#), followed by the decimal representation of the code point,
+followed by a semi-colon. To convert the Hexadecimal values to decmal values you can do the following in perl:
+
+<code lang="perl">
+print 0x20A8, "\n";  # 8360
+print 0x20B9, "\n";  # 8377
+</code>
+
+So in HTML you would include <hl>&amp;#8360;</hl> and <hl>&amp;#8377;</hl> respectively.
+
+I have used perl 5.14.2 on Linux to test the above. In older versions of Perl the above might not work.
+