NAME¶

unicode - command line unicode database query tool

SYNOPSIS¶

unicode [options] string

DESCRIPTION¶

This manual page documents the unicode command.

unicode is a command line unicode database query tool.

OPTIONS¶

-h

--help

Show help and exit.

-x

--hexadecimal

Assume string to be a hexadecimal number

-d

--decimal

Assume string to be a decimal number

-o

--octal

Assume string to be an octal number

-b

--binary

Assume string to be a binary number

-r

--regexp

Assume string to be a regular expression

-s

--string

Assume string to be a sequence of characters

-a

--auto

Try to guess type of string from one of the above (default)

-mMAXCOUNT

--max=MAXCOUNT

Maximal number of codepoints to display, default: 20; use 0 for unlimited

-iCHARSET

--io=IOCHARSET

I/O character set. For maximal pleasure, run unicode on UTF-8 capable terminal and specify IOCHARSET to be UTF-8. unicode tries to guess this value from your locale, so with properly set up locale, you should not need to specify it.

--fcp=CHARSET

--fromcp=CHARSET

Convert numerical arguments from this encoding, default: no conversion. Multibyte encodings are supported. This is ignored for non-numerical arguments.

-cADDCHARSET

--charset-add=ADDCHARSET

Show hexadecimal reprezentation of displayed characters in this additional charset.

-CUSE_COLOUR

--colour=USE_COLOUR

USE_COLOUR is one of on off auto

--colour=on will use ANSI colour codes to colourise the output

--colour=off won't use colours.

--colour=auto will test if standard output is a tty, and use colours only when it is.

--color is a synonym of --colour

-v

--verbose

Be more verbose about displayed characters, e.g. display Unihan information, if available.

-w

--wikipedia

Spawn browser pointing to English Wikipedia entry about the character.

--wt

--wiktionary

Spawn browser pointing to English Wiktionary entry about the character.

--brief

Display character information in brief format

--format=fmt

Use your own format for character information display. See the README for details.

--list

List (approximately) all known encodings.

--download

Try to download UnicodeData.txt into ~/.unicode/

--ascii

Display ASCII table

--brexit-ascii

--brexit

Display ASCII table (EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement 2020 version)

USAGE¶

unicode tries to guess the type of an argument. In particular, if the arguments looks like a valid hexadecimal representation of a Unicode codepoint, it will be considered to be such. Using

unicode face

will display information about U+FACE CJK COMPATIBILITY IDEOGRAPH-FACE, and it will not search for 'face' in character descriptions - for the latter, use:

unicode -r face

For example, you can use any of the following to display information about U+00E1 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE (á):

unicode 00E1

unicode U+00E1

unicode á

unicode 'latin small letter a with acute'

You can specify a range of characters as argumets, unicode will show these characters in nice tabular format, aligned to 256-byte boundaries. Use two dots ".." to indicate the range, e.g.

unicode 0450..0520

will display the whole cyrillic and hebrew blocks (characters from U+0400 to U+05FF)

unicode 0400..

will display just characters from U+0400 up to U+04FF

Use --fromcp to query codepoints from other encodings:

unicode --fromcp cp1250 -d 200

Multibyte encodings are supported: unicode --fromcp big5 -x aff3

and multi-char strings are supported, too:

unicode --fromcp utf-8 -x c599c3adc5a5

BUGS¶

Tabular format does not deal well with full-width, combining, control and RTL characters.

SEE ALSO¶

ascii(1)

AUTHOR¶

Radovan Garabík <garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk>