I'm trying to find a workaround to display old and rare characters in unicode using character combining. Currently I'm converting some dictionaries from EPWING into text and there are 36 different characters which cannot be reproduced using normal UTF-8. Below is the problem section of the epwing gaiji to unicode mappings for one of the dictionaries that I am converting, in some areas it has an interesting syntax that is clearly being used to combine characters in different ways. I was hoping if someone could identify what this syntax is, and where I might find documentation or a tutorial on how to use it.
s/<?w=b02a>/𡓦/g
s/<?w=b04b>/者/g
s/<?w=b064>/<⾱ 𤰇>/g
s/<?w=b077>/<彳<匕\/匕>>/g
s/<?w=b07c>/<山\/⺀>/g
s/<?w=b12e>/𥝝/g
s/<?w=b155>/<／>/g
s/<?w=b156>/<\/>/g
s/<?w=b157>/<\/\/>/g
s/<?w=b158>/<こ[1]/と|ヿ>/g
s/<?w=b16f>/<㗢>/g
s/<?w=b170>/<㗥>/g
s/<?w=b171>/ଏ/g
s/<?w=b175>/lb/g
s/<?w=b22a>//g
s/<?w=b234>/ff/g
s/<?w=b25e>/㯌/g
s/<?w=b271>/<扌 晉>/g
s/<?w=b36b>/𣴴/g
s/<?w=b373>/𥝱/g
s/<?w=b42c>/𦼠/g
s/<?w=b434>/<已\/大>/g
s/<?w=b438>/𩸽/g
s/<?w=b43a>/𩺊/g
s/<?w=b43f>/<㇀/丶>/g
s/<?w=b440>/𠂆/g
s/<?w=b45a>/<？>/g
s/<?w=b45b>/<｜>/g
s/<?w=b53d>/<?>/g
s/<?w=b53e>/<?>/g
s/<?w=b540>/<o>/g
s/<?w=b537>/<ト モ>/g
s/<?w=b541>/<一/𠔀>/g
s/<?w=b544>/<?>/g
s/<?w=b546>/<[r45]卐>/g
s/<?w=b55f>/*/g
I know that this line is supposed to represent 彳as a left vertical radical with one 匕 stacked on top of another 匕 as the right vertical portion of the character:
s/<?w=b077>/<彳<匕\/匕>>/g
This one is also pretty obvious, it's a 卐 rotated 45 degrees:
s/<?w=b546>/<[r45]卐>/g
Note: the four character hexadecimal codes that come after the ?w= is an identifier for the epwing gaiji that the unicode is supposed to correspond to.
Thank you for your time.
Please see The Unicode Standard section 12.2, Ideographic Description Characters. It discusses your precise situation.
Unfortunately, you may found that software support for what you are trying to do is practically non-existent.
Related
Where can I get the complete list of all unicode characters that doesn't behave as simple characters. Examples: character 0x0363 (won't be printed without another one before), character 0x0084 (does weird things when printed). I need just a raw list of such unusual characters to replace them with something harmless to avoid unwanted output effects. Regular characters (those who not in this list) should use exactly one character place when printed (= cursor moved +1 to the right), should not depend on previous or next characters, and should not affect printing style in any way.
Edit because of multiple comments:
I have some unicode string, usually consists of "usual" characters like 0x20-0x7E or cyrillic letters. Also, there are a lot of other unicode characters that are usual and may be safely assumed as having strlen() = 1. The string is printed on the terminal and I should know the resulting position of the cursor. I don't want to use some complex and non-stable libraries to do that, i want to have simplest possible logic to do that. Every problematic character may be replaced with U+0xFFFD or something like "<U+0363>" (ASCII string with its index instead of character itself). I want to have a list of "possibly-problematic" characters to replace. It is acceptable to have some non-problematic characters in this list too, but not much.
There is no simple algorithm for this. You'll likely need a complex, but extremely stable library: libicu, or something based on it. Basically every other library that does this kind of work is based on libicu, which is maintained by the Unicode organization.
If you don't want to use the official library (or something based on their library), you'll need to parse the Unicode Character Database yourself. In particular, you need to look at Character Properties, and parse the files in the UCD.
I believe you're asking for Bidi_Class (i.e. "direction") to be Left_To_Right, Canonical_Combining_Class to be Not_Reordered, and Joining_Type to be Non_Joining.
You probably also want to check the General_Category and avoid M* (Marks) and C* (Other).
This should work for some Emoji, but this whole approach will break a lot of emoji that look simple and are not. Most famously: ❤️, which is two "characters," not one. You may want to filter out Emoji. As a simple starting point, you may want to restrict yourself to the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which are code points 0000-FFFF. Anything above this range is, almost by definition, rare or unusual. The BMP does include some emoji, but most emoji (and all new emoji) are outside the range.
Remember that the glyphs for single characters can still have radically different widths, even in nominally fixed-width fonts. For example, 𒈙 (U+12219 CUNEIFORM SIGN LUGAL OPPOSING LUGAL) is a completely "normal" character in the way you're describing. It is left-to-right. It doesn't depend on or influence characters around it (it's non-combining and non-joining). Its "length in characters" is 1. Its glyph is also extremely wide in most fonts and breaks a lot of layout. I don't know anything in the Unicode database that would warn you of this, since "glyph width" is entirely a function of fonts, not characters, and Unicode explicitly does not consider fonts. (That said, most of the most problematic characters are outside the BMP. Probably the most common exception is DŽ, but many fixed-width fonts have a narrow glyph for it: DŽ.)
Let's write some cuneiform in a fixed-width font.
Normally, every character should line up with a character above.
Here: 𒈙. See how these characters don't align correctly?
Not only is it a very wide glyph, but its width is not even a multiple.
At least not in my font (Mac Safari 15.0).
But DŽ is ok.
Also remember that there are multiple ways to encode the same "character." For example, é can be a "simple" character (U+00E9), or it can be two characters (U+0065, U+0301). So in some cases é may print in your scheme, and in others it won't. I suspect this is fine for your problem, but if it isn't, you're going to need to apply a normalization form (likely NFC).
I'm trying to gather a Unicode list of all the 'o' like shapes in the Hindi character-set. In fact, a list of any characters (in any language) that makes uses of separate characters to indicate an accent would be better.
I intend to use this unicode-list in a RegExp.
I been trying to edit a list of character-ranges by outputting them in an Input TextField, but editing this text causes weird issues (the keyboard-cursor isn't place on the correct character, selections suddenly dissappear / incorrectly warps... in other words... HINDI HELL!)
I've tried this with Notepad++ too, but although it was more responsive, it eventually crapped out on me like it did in the Flash Player textfield. This seems to occur especially while removing the [] block (nulls?) characters. Some of them trigger odd behaviors.
Anyways, all I want is a list of the accents.
An example of a few are in the image below (but I would need ALL accents):
Thanks!
You can find pdf's containing lists of unicode ranges, grouped by language, here: http://unicode.org/charts/
For Hindi, you probably want Devanagari or Devanagari Extended.
Here is the character class for Devanagari combining marks:
[\u901\u902\u903\u93c\u93e\u93f\u940\u941\u942\u943
\u944\u945\u946\u947\u948\u949\u94a\u94b\u94c\u94d
\u951\u952\u953\u954\u962\u963]
This is only the basic Devanagari block (not Devanagari Extended).
If you want the complete set (for all languages), you can do it problematically.
You start from the Unicode date file at ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/6.1.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt, described by TR-44 (http://unicode.org/reports/tr44/#Property_Definitions)
You can use the Canonical_Combining_Class field (see at http://unicode.org/reports/tr44/#Canonical_Combining_Class_Values) to filter the exact characters you want.
Can't be more precise, because "accent" a bit vague :-)
You might even have to also look at General_Category to get the filter right (and exclude certain marks, or symbols, or punctuation).
And a script doing this would definitely be better than trying to mess with text editors.
One of the characteristics of combining characters is that they combine :-)
So you might get all kind of puzzling results (like this: http://www.siao2.com/2006/02/17/533929.aspx :-)
I am looking for an online service (or collection of images) that can return an image for any unicode code point.
Unicode.org does not have an image for each one, consider for example
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=31cf
EDIT: I need to use these images programmatically, so the code chart PDFs provided at unicode.org are not useful.
The images in the PDF are copyrighted, so there are legal issues around extracting them. (I am not a lawyer.) I suspect that those legal issues prevent a simple solution from being provided, unless someone wants to go to the trouble of drawing all of those images. It might happen, but seems unlikely.
Your best bet is to download a selection of fonts that collectively cover the entire range of characters, and display the characters using those fonts. There are two difficulties with this approach: combining characters and invisible characters.
The combining characters can easily be detected from the Unicode database, and you can supply a base character (such as NBSP) to use for displaying them. (There is a special code point intended for this purpose, but I can't find it at the moment.)
Invisible characters could be displayed with a dotted square box containing the abbreviation for the character. Those you may have to locate manually and construct the necessary abbreviations. I am not aware of any shortcuts for that.
I found this question which gives me the ability to check if a string contains a Chinese character. I'm not sure if the unicode ranges are correct but they seem to return false for Japanese and Korean and true for Chinese.
What it doesn't do is tell if the character is traditional or simplified Chinese. How would you go about finding this out?
update
Q: How can I recognize from the 32 bit value of a Unicode character if this is a Chinese, Korean or Japanese character?
http://unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html
Their argument that the characters regardless of their shape have the same meaning and therefore should be represented by the same code. Well, it's not meaningless to me because I am analyzing individual characters which doesn't work with their solution:
A better solution is to look at the text as a whole: if there's a fair amount of kana, it's probably Japanese, and if there's a fair amount of hangul, it's probably Korean.
As already stated, you can't reliably detect the script style from a single character, but it is possible for a sufficiently long sample of text. See https://github.com/jpatokal/script_detector for a Ruby gem that does the job, and Simplified Chinese Unicode table for a general discussion.
It is possible for some characters. The Traditional and Simplified character sets overlap, so you have basically three sets of characters:
Characters that are traditional only.
Characters that are simplified only.
Characters that have been left untouched, and are available in both.
Take the character 面 for instance. It belongs both to #2 and #3... As a simplified character, it stands for 面 and 麵, face and noodles. Whereas 麵 is a traditional character only. So in the Unihan database, 麵 has a kSimplifiedVariant, which points to 面. So you can deduct that it is a traditional character only.
But 面 also has a kTraditionalVariant, which points to 麵. This is where the system breaks: if you use this data to deduct that 面 is a simplified character only, you'd be wrong...
On the other hand, 韩 has a kTraditionalVariant, pointing to 韓, and these two are a "real" Simplified/Traditional pair. But nothing in the Unihan database differentiates cases like 韓/韩 from cases like 麵/面.
As I think you've discovered, you can't. Simplified and traditional are just two styles of writing the same characters - it's like the difference between Roman and Gothic script for European languages.
Does someone know a easy way to find characters in Unicode that are similar to ASCII characters. An example is the "CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DZE (ѕ)". I'd like to do a search and replace for similar characters. By similar I mean human readable. You can't see a difference by looking at it.
As noted by other commenters, Unicode normalisation ("compatibilty characters") isn't going to help you here as you aren't looking for official equivalences but for similarities in glyphs (letter shapes). (The linked Unicode Technical Report is still worth reading, though, as it is extremely well written.)
If I were you, to spare you the tedious work of assembling a list of characters yourself, I'd search for resources on homograph attacks: This is a method of maliciously misleading web users by displaying URLs containing domain names in which some letters have been replaced with visually similar letters. Another Unicode Technical Report, on security, contains a section on the problem. There is also -- and that may be what you most need -- a "confusables" table. Here's another article with mainly punctuation marks, some of which ASCII, that have visually similar counterparts in the non-ASCII code tables.
What I do hope is that you aren't asking the question to construct such an attack.
See the Unicode Database: http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt.
Each line describes a unicode caharacter, for example:
1E9A;LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RIGHT HALF RING;Ll;0;L;<compat> 0061 02BE;;;;N;;;;;
If there's any similar (compatible) characters for that symbol, it will appear in the <compat> field of the entry. In this example, 0061 (ASCII a) is compatible to the LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RIGHT HALF RING Unicode character.
As for your character, the entry is
0455;CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DZE;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;;0405;;0405
which, as you can see, does not specify a compatibility character.