How do I get MacPerl to recognize the Mac character set?
A byte can store 8 bits, however, there is only a general agreement as how to use the bottom 7 bits (i.e. the first 128) for representing characters. This standard is ASCII. (Of course, even this has opponents e.g. IBM’s use of EBCDIC). The top 128 characters which can be stored in a byte are the extended characters. However, which character is represented by which bit-pattern is font-dependent, and especially machine-dependent. Some machines do share the same extended character set e.g. Unix and MS-Windows both use the ISO-lat1 (Latin-1) character set; this is not the same as that generally used on a Macintosh. In regular expressions, \w can be used to match against an alphanumeric character, where this set of characters is [A-Za-z0-9_]. This will not match against å, é, ü, è, or any other accented characters which are found in the extended characters of the Macintosh character set (or any other extended characters for this matter). Portability of code (from platform to platform, and
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