perl specify unicode character by name without putting name in all caps - perl

Question

So, this is sort of a cosmetic point, but is there an easy way to insert a unicode character by its name inside a Perl string and give the name "normal" casing?
Perl includes unicode literals that look up code points by name, as in the following:
"\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA}"
I find something like the following easier to read:
"\N{Greek Small Letter Alpha}",
As far as I know there are no case minimal pairs when it comes to unicode character names. Is there a concise way to name the character that still triggers a compilation error very early in the process of executing a script if the character doesn't exist?
example compilation error with intentionally misspelled character name, this is the kind of check I don't want to give up.
$ echo '%[a]' | ./unicodify
Unknown charname 'GREK SMALL LETTER ALPHA' at ./unicodify line 10, within string
Execution of ./unicodify aborted due to compilation errors.
I'm trying to write a small utility to make it easier to enter unicode characters in text files by mnemonic names delimited by %[ and ].
Here's an extremely stripped down example that just replaces %[a] and %[b].
#! /usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use open ':std' => ':utf8';
my %abbrevs = (
'a' => "\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA}",
'b' => "\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA}",
);
while (<>) {
chomp;
my $line = $_;
$line =~ s/(\%\[(.*?)\])/$abbrevs{$2}/g;
print "${line}\n";
}

Answer 1

Quote charnames,
Starting in Perl v5.16, any occurrence of \N{CHARNAME} sequences in a double-quotish string automatically loads this module with arguments :full and :short (described below) if it hasn't already been loaded with different arguments
On of those "different arguments" requests the use of loose matching.
$ perl -CSD -e'
use charnames ":loose";
CORE::say "\N{Greek Small Letter Alpha}";
'
α
LOOSE MATCHES
By specifying :loose, Unicode's loose character name matching rules are selected instead of the strict exact match used otherwise. That means that CHARNAME doesn't have to be so precisely specified. Upper/lower case doesn't matter (except with scripts as mentioned above), nor do any underscores, and the only hyphens that matter are those at the beginning or end of a word in the name (with one exception: the hyphen in U+1180 HANGUL JUNGSEONG O-E does matter). Also, blanks not adjacent to hyphens don't matter. The official Unicode names are quite variable as to where they use hyphens versus spaces to separate word-like units, and this option allows you to not have to care as much. The reason non-medial hyphens matter is because of cases like U+0F60 TIBETAN LETTER -A versus U+0F68 TIBETAN LETTER A. The hyphen here is significant, as is the space before it, and so both must be included.
:loose slows down look-ups by a factor of 2 to 3 versus :full, but the trade-off may be worth it to you. Each individual look-up takes very little time, and the results are cached, so the speed difference would become a factor only in programs that do look-ups of many different spellings, and probably only when those look-ups are through vianame() and string_vianame(), since \N{...} look-ups are done at compile time.
The module also provides the means for creating custom aliases.