Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish

I was looking at doing a little bit of political activism on twitter, and as part of this, though about maximising the amount of information in each tweet a la Tweet Compressor which is an abuse of unicode to increase the 140 character (not byte!) limit for tweets.

Here's the implementation:


use utf8;
sub tweet_compress {
my $tweet = shift;
$tweet =~ s/\. ?$//; # we don't need no end of sentence punctuation
my @orig = ( qw/cc ms ns ps in ls fi fl ffl ffi iv ix vi oy ii xi nj/, ". " ,", ");
my @new = qw/㏄ ㎳ ㎱ ㎰ ㏌ ʪ fi fl ffl ffi ⅳ ⅸ ⅵ ѹ ⅱ ⅺ nj ． ，/;
$tweet =~ s/\Q$orig[$_]\E/$new[$_]/g for 0 .. $#orig;
return $tweet;
}


Doing the rest of the right thing with unicode is a bit annoying (e.g.

binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';

to output the tweet correctly to stdout), and I really wish there were better unicode docs that didn't have high cognitive load.