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=head1 DESCRIPTION

WARNING: Alpha grade software.

Data::Decode implements a pluggable "decoder". The main aim is to provide
a uniform interface to decode a given data while allowing the actual
algorithm being used to be changed depending on your needs..

For now this is aimed at decoding miscellaneous text to perl's internal 
unicode encoding.

=head1 DECODING TO UNICODE

Japanese, which is the language that I mainly deal with, has an annoying
property, in that it can come in at least 4 different flavors (utf-8,
shift-jis, euc-jp and iso-2022-jp).
Even worse, vendors may have more vendor-specific symbols, such as the
pictograms in mobile phones.

Ways to decode these strings into unicode varies between each environment 
and application.

Many modules require that the strings be normalized to unicode, but they
all handle this normalization process differently, which is, well, not exactly
an optimal solution.

Data::Decode provides a uniform interface to this problem, and a few common
ways decoding is handled. The actual decoding strategies are separated out
from the surface interface, so other users who find a particular strategy to
decode strings can then upload their way to CPAN, and everyone can benefit
from it.

=head1 DEFAULT STRATEGIES