_charnames

📦 min

_charnames - the Unicode character name table behind \N{NAME}, charnames::viacode, charnames::vianame and \p{name=...}.

use charnames ();
printf "%s | U+%04X | %s\n", charnames::viacode(0x263A),
    charnames::vianame("GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA"),
    "\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE}" eq "\x{e9}" ? "same" : "differs";
# WHITE SMILING FACE | U+03B1 | same

Nothing uses _charnames directly: it is the internal half of charnames, loaded by the first \N{...} or charnames call. The names are those of Unicode 17.0.0, as in perl 5.44.

_charnames.pm 1.51 is upstream’s. Its one large input, unicore/Name.pl, is stored in the binary when pperl is built rather than read from disk at the first lookup, so it costs no parsing or file access.

Differences from upstream

None in behaviour.