September 2018 Archives

Image::PNG::Libpng now on Strawberry Perl

I recently received a bug report about installing Image::PNG::Libpng on Strawberry Perl. It was failing to install due to using the wrong C compiler.

Up to version 0.44 of the module, I'd been checking for the presence of libpng using Devel::CheckLib, however somehow or another that didn't seem to be working and I'd gone back to using my own module to detect the library.

Although this improvised detecting module was getting its information about the compiler flags and library flags from Config, I'd omitted to use the information about what the C compiler might be. Once I changed my module to get its information on the C compiler from $Config::Config{cc}, it worked on Strawberry Perl too.

So now you can use Lego::FromPNG, FuseBead::FromPNG, and some other modules on Strawberry Perl.

Stripping diacritics from input

If you have input containing lots of Unicode diacritics, and you need to process them into equivalent ASCII characters, there are several options on CPAN. My module Unicode::Diacritic::Strip offers a slow and reliable method involving the use of Unicode::UCD, and a fast method involving a tr/// operator.

Today I was examining user logs for a web application, and I noticed that the fast method had completely failed on input "Jalālu'd Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī" because it had failed to catch the middle h character. Looking at the Unicode characters I found a whole block of Latin characters which I'd omitted. I've now added them to the application for version 0.11

Lingua::EN::ABC now has a spelling-only option

My module Lingua::EN::ABC converts between American, British and Canadian types of English. I've added a new "spelling-only" option to the module which makes it not convert words unless they are pronounced the same but spelt differently. So before it was changing "aluminum" and "aluminium" and "burned" and "burnt", it now won't do that if the spelling-only option is on. This is to assist in looking up words in a dictionary which doesn't feature both kinds of spelling.

An example of using the option is here.

About Ben Bullock

user-pic Perl user since about 2006, I have also released some CPAN modules.