""
operator so that it returns false and yet true, at the same time. Yesterday, I spent some time exchanging email on the subject
of functions to munge input and return properly accented and encoded strings (e.g. Montreal becomes Montréal)
This led to a brief and horrible tangent invoving Unicode which prompted me to comment that atleast with Unicode you get real
smiley faces in the place of emoticons. Today, I started to write a Perl class whose only role is to overload ""
so that a regular old string is both an object and a regular old string. This is a bit more interesting when you consider that
the package also has ::CDATA and ::Encoded subclasses but more on that later. So my first thought when I saw an emoticon this
afternoon? Write a class whose constructor accepts an emoticon and then overload its "" operator to return the
equivalent Unicode character...