Text::CharWidth version 0.04
============================

This is a module to provide equivalent feature as wcwidth(3) and
wcswidth(3).  This also provides mblen(3) equivalent subroutine.

mbwidth() and mbswidth() are provided subroutines corresponding
wcwidth(3) and wcswidth(3) in C language.  The prefix "mb" expresses
that they handles "multibyte character" in C meaning, i.e., character
encoding specified by LC_CTYPE locale.

These subroutines are used to get the width of characters on terminal.
Though most characters have width of 1, there are exceptions.
Fullwidth characters are characters with width of 2.  Most of east
Asian characters such as Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Han Ideogram
are fullwidth.  Combining characters are characters with width of 0.
Unicode has many combining characters like diacritical marks.  There
are languages which need combining characters such as Thai and
Vietnamese.

Thus, if you would like to format international texts on terminal,
you will have to be aware of variation of character width and will
want to use this module.

mblen() returns the number of bytes for the first character of
the given string.  In 8bit character encodings, it is always 1.
However, in multibyte encodings, this may be more than 1.

The parameter is given in locale encoding, not UTF-8 string.
(Of course locale encoding is UTF-8 in UTF-8 locales.)


Prerequisites
-------------

This module requires your system to have wcwidth(), wcswidth(), and
mblen() functions which are complian with the Single Unix Specification.


Build and Install
-----------------

Please use standard way to build and install this module:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make install


COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
---------------------

Copyright (C) 2003 Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms of either:

    a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
       Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later
       version, or

    b) the "Artistic License" which comes with Perl.

