When reporting bugs in one of my programs (which handles specialized XML files containing Bible text, which may contain copyrighted or otherwise protected material), there is an option to submit an anonymized XML file with the report. As some bugs only happen with certainly formatted text in the fields, punctuation should be preserved and only letters and digits anonymized.
At the moment, the code first identifies fields that should be anonymized, then iterates over each character and replaces uppercase Latin letters by X, lowercase Latin letters by x, Digits by 0 and Greek letters by Χ / χ.
Now I got a report that it does not work with Cyrillic text. I fixed it now by replacing any Unicode letters by X or x, but that will change the script of the letters unneccessarily and may make bugs unreproducible.
I could now of course add another special case for Cyrillic to solve this, and wait for the next bug report.
But I wondered if anybody else may have already compiled a list or database of "anonymizing" characters for each script available in Unicode. Or found a way to extract it from the UnicodeData either included in Java or provided by the Unicode consortium. Preferrably as a Java library, but any other file that can be used from Java should be fine, too.
Related
In a mapping editor, the display is correct after the legacy to unicode conversion for DEVANAGARI text shown using a unicode font (Arial Unicode MS). However, in MS-WORD, the display isn't as expected for the same unicode text in the unicode font (Arial Unicode MS) or any other Devanagari unicode fonts. The expected sequence of unicodes are provided as per the documentation. The sequence can be seen on the left-hand side table.
Please let me know where I am going wrong.
Thanks for your help!
Does your map have to insert the zero_width_joiner? The halant (virama) by itself is enough to get the half-consonant (for some combinations) and in particular, it may be that Word is using the presence of the ZWJ to keep them separate.
If getting rid of the ZWJ doesn't help, another possibility is that Word may be treating the individual characters of the text string as individual "runs" of text.
If those first 4 characters are not in a single run, this can happen.
[aside: the way to tell if it's being treated as a single run, is to save the document as an xml file and then open it with something like notepad++ and look at the xml "w:t" element (IIRC) associated with these characters. If they're all in separate w:t elements, it means they're in separate runs. In that case, you might need to copy the text from Word to some other tool (e.g. Notepad++) and then copy it from there and paste it back in Word -- that might cause it to be imported into Word in a single run.
I am new to Unicode have been given the requirement to look at some translated text, iterate over all of the characters of that translation and determine if all the characters are valid for the target culture (language and location).
For example, if I am translating a document from English to Greek, I want to detect if there are any English/ASCII "A"s in the Greek translation and report that as an error. This may likely be the case from corrupted data from a translation memory.
Is there any existing grouping of Unicode characters by culture? Or is there any existing strategy for developing this kind of grouping? I see that there is some grouping of characters at (http://www.unicode.org/charts/). But it seems that this is not quite what I am looking for at first glance.
Does any thing exist like "Here are the valid Unicode characters for Spanish - Spain: [some Unicode range(s)]" or "Here are the valid Unicode characters for Russian - Russia: [some Unicode range(s)]"
Or has anyone developed a strategy to define these?
If this is not the right place to ask this question, I would welcome any direction on where might be a good place to ask the question.
This is something that CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) deals with. It is not part of the Unicode Standard, but it is an activity and a resource managed by the Unicode Consortium. The LDML specification defines the format of the locale data. The Character Elements define some sets of characters: “main/standard”, “auxiliary”, “index”, and “punctuation”.
The data for Greek includes only Greek letters and some basic punctuation. This, like all such data at CLDR, is largely subjective. And even though the CLDR process is meant to produce well-reviewed data based on consensus, the reality is different. It can be argued that in normal Greek texts, Latin letters are not uncommon, especially in technical areas. For example, the international symbol for the ampere is “A” as a Latin letter; the symbol for the kilogram is “kg”, in Latin letters, even though the word for it is written Greek letters in Greek.
Thus, no matter how you run the analysis, the occurrence of Latin “A” in Greek text could be flagged as potentially suspicious, but not an error.
There are C/C++ and Java libraries that implement access to CLDR data, as part of ICU.
I have a document which has been sloppily authored. It's a dictionary that contains cyrillic characters. Most of the dictionary is manageable, but I'm stuck with one thing I need help with. Words have accented letters in them and they're mostly formatted properly as a letter with a unicode accent (thus forming a single letter). However there are some very peculiar letters that look similar for example to: a;´ (where "a" is any arbitrary cyrillic letter). You'd expect á in its place. However it wouldn't be a problem per se if only this thing could be exported to, say HTML and manipulated in a text editor. The problem is that Word treats this "thing" as a single character/entity and
when exporting it is COMPLETELY omitted
when copied it can only be pasted into Notepad (which translates it into three separate characters), when being pasted into WordPad it just won't appear at all.
when a search is run in Word it won't find the letter, neither the actual character nor the exactly copied/pasted combination.
the letter will disappear when the document is opened in any other software, such as Libre Office
At this point I'm trying to:
understand what this combination is exactly
run a search/replace operation to find and weed out all of those errors
Here's a sample Word file.
Here's a screenshot of the word/letter in question:
which when typed correctly should appear like "скре́пка".
The 'character' appears to be a Word field of type 'eq' (equation). Here is the field with toggled field codes:
If it is a large document you could try to create a VBA routine that removes the fields and replaces them with corresponding characters.
Assuming that #Anonimista’s analysis is correct, as I think it is, you could fix the file by running some search and replace operations in Word, replacing e.g. ^19eq \o(е;´)^21 by е́ (the latter is Cyrillic letter е followed by combining acute accent U+0301). This is dull because you would need to do this for each vowel separately (and for uppercase vowels too). But I cannot find a way to use wildcards in this context; the codes ^19 and ^21 for start and end of field work only when wildcards are not enabled.
What is the subset of Unicode characters that are normally used in writing — such as those that would be typically found in a newspaper article?
For example, in English, the characters in the range [a-zA-Z0-9], plus some punctuation characters, would be sufficient for most writing.
But I want to support languages that use characters that fall outside the ASCII range, while excluding the non-printing or decorative characters.
The objective is to restrict the user input to the application to codepoints that are legitimately used in written language. Because the user input will be saved and displayed, I do not want to allow pranksters to input text consisting entirely of things like diacritics, Unicode combining characters, Unicode flow control characters, etc.
Regrettably, I am not fluent in every single language found in Unicode. Has anyone compiled a list of all of the subset of Unicode characters that are normally used in writing?
The official list of Unicode code points is UnicodeData.txt. This is a plain text file with one line per code point; it's easily machine-readable. For example:
0022;QUOTATION MARK;Po;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;;
The third semicolon-delimited field is the abbreviated name of the "General Category". This is explained further in chapter 4 of the Unicode Standard, specifically in section 4.5; see the table on page 131 (page 12 of the PDF file). For example, "Lu" is uppercase letters, "Ll" is lowercase letters, Pc, Pd, Ps, et al are various kinds of punctuation. (The first letter of the two-letter abbreviation represents a higher-level category such as letter, digit, punctuation, etc.)
Note that some ranges of code points are not listed explicitly. For example, the range of CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) ideographs is represented as:
4E00;<CJK Ideograph, First>;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
9FCC;<CJK Ideograph, Last>;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
I think there are other files on unicode.org that fill in these gaps.
I'm still not 100% clear on just what subset you're trying to define, but you can probably define it as a particular set of General Category values.
I do not want to allow pranksters to input text consisting entirely of things like diacritics, Unicode combining characters
Diacritics/combining characters will be used in normal written language. So if you want to stop 'pranksters' you're going to need something more sophisticated than just a list of permitted characters. You'll have to do some sort of linguistic analysis for every language you want to permit.
I'd recommend not bothering with this, because it's going to be hard and you won't succeed anyway. Just let people write what they want.
Try WGL4 (652 characters), MES-1 (335 characters) or MES-2 (1062 characters). Find these at Wikipedia.
You may wish to exclude characters IJijĸĿŀʼn˚―⅛⅜⅝⅞♪ from MES-1 if you want to use this set.
Edit: I realize this is a bad answer. Especially the removing characters from MES-1 part was total garbage. I shouldn't have posted this. I'm ashamed of whoever upvoted this.
If anything, use Subset1 (678 characters), Subset2 (1193 characters) and Subset3 (2823 characters). https://unicodesubsets.miraheze.org/wiki/User:PiotrGrochowski
I copied large amount of text from another system to my PC. When I viewed the text in my PC, it looked weird. So I copied all the fonts from the other PC and installed them in mine too. Now the text looks okay, but actually it seems that is not in Unicode. For example, if I copy the text and paste in another UTF-8 supported editor such as Notepad++, I get English characters ("bgah;") only like shown below.
How to convert this whole text into unicode text, like the one below. So I can copy the text and paste anywhere else.
பெயர்
The above text was manually obtained using http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/Tamil
I need this conversion to be done, so I can copy them into database tables.
'Ja-01' is a font with a custom 'visual encoding'.
That is to say, the sequence of characters really is "bgah;" and it only looks like Tamil to you because the font's shapes for the Latin characters bg look like பெ.
This is always to be avoided, because by storing the content as "bgah;" you lose the ability to search and process it as real Tamil, but this approach was common in the pre-Unicode days especially for less-widespread scripts without mature encoding standards. This application probably predates widespread use of TSCII.
Because it is a custom encoding not shared by any other font, it is very unlikely you will be able to find a tool to convert content in this encoding to proper Unicode characters. It does not appear to be any standard character ordering, so you will have to look at the font (eg in charmap.exe) and note down every character, find the matching character in Unicode and map between them.
For example here's a trivial Python script to replace characters in a file:
mapping= {
u'a': u'\u0BAF', # Tamil letter Ya
u'b': u'\u0BAA', # Tamil letter Pa
u'g': u'\u0BC6', # Tamil vowel sign E (combining)
u'h': u'\u0BB0', # Tamil letter Ra
u';': u'\u0BCD', # Tamil sign virama (combining)
# fill in the rest of the mapping information here!
}
with open('ja01data.txt', 'rb') as fp:
data= fp.read().decode('utf-8')
for char in mapping:
data= data.replace(char, mapping[char])
with open('utf8data.txt', 'wb') as fp:
fp.write(data.encode('utf-8'))
The font you found is getting you into trouble. The actual cell text is "bgah;", it gets rendered to பெயர் because you found a font that can work with 8-bit non-Unicode characters. So reading it or pasting it into Notepad++ is going to produce "bgah;" since that's the real text. It can only ever be rendered properly again by forcing the program that displays the string to use that same font.
Ditch the font and enter Unicode so it looks like this:
"bgah" looks like a Baamini based system, which is pre-unicode. It was popular in Canada (and the SL Tamil diaspora in general) in the 90s.
As the others mentioned, it looks like a custom visual encoding that mimics the performance of a foreign script while maintaining ASCII encoding.
Google "Baamini to unicode convertor". The University of Colombo seems to have put one up: http://www.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/ltrl/services/feconverter/?maps=t_b-u.xml
Let me know if this works. If not, I can ask around and get something for you.
You could first check whether the encoding is TSCII, as this sounds most probable. It is an 8-bit encoding, and the fonts you copied are probably based on that encoding. Check out whether the TSCII to UTF-8 converter at SourceForge is suitable. The project there is called “Any Tamil Encoding to Unicode” but they say that only TSCII is supported for now.