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