SYNOPSIS

        use Lingua::EN::Pseudolocalize qw( convert deconvert );
    
        my $text = 'Widdly scuds?';
    
        my $pl_text = convert($text);

DESCRIPTION

    This package contains utilities for pseudolocalizing English or similar
    languages expressable in the ASCII character set.

    Applications created or maintained by English-speaking developers may
    suffer from overlooked Unicode support due to the ASCII, latin1,
    Windows CP1252, and utf8 encodings being equivalent for the code points
    used in English. You may think that your application is
    Unicode-friendly, but it's easy to forget to test for extended
    character support. It goes overlooked until a customer pastes in some
    decorative quotes from MS Word and you end up with mojibake in your
    app.

    This module will convert your basic Latin characters to similar-looking
    characters that are much higher on the code plane. This process is
    called pseudolocalization, and it will very quickly expose a few common
    errors in encoding support.

    DO NOT USE THIS MODULE IN PRODUCTION. Use it in read-only mode, or on a
    test data set. It should make round-trip conversions just fine, but if
    you have data in your application that is in the conversion table, no
    effort is made to preserve your data. It might end up stripping out all
    the diacritics from your data, and that would ruin your comprehensive
    database of melodic Finnish folk-metal bands.

FUNCTIONS

    convert($text)

      Converts $text into pseudolocalized text using a simple mapping
      table. A few pairs are combined into single characters with
      ligatures, while the rest are simple one-to-one mappings.

      Returns: the converted string

    deconvert($text)

      Reverses the process of convert() using the same mapping table.

      Returns: the converted string

