Search for a character by name

    Have you ever had the need to find a symbol by its partial name? Sometimes it happens to me, for example, to find the letter “ѣ” never used by me, to find the Greek alphabet characters (σ, ε, μ), etc. A convenient tool for this is kcharselect from KDE4, but for the sake of the only utility, you are reluctant to put a healthy piece of KDE. Therefore, there was an idea to write a script that would search for a character by description.

    The solution is relatively simple. There is a file with a description of the characters and their codes, we find the desired description, and display on the screen along with the character. In Gentoo Linux, such a file can be found here: / usr / share / misc / unicode (part of sys-apps / miscfiles). A universal option is to take data from ftp.unicode.org.

    The code itself looks like this:
    #!/usr/bin/env python
    from __future__ import print_function
    from sys import argv, version_info
    import csv
    import re
    if version_info[0] == 3:
        unichr = chr

    data = '/usr/share/misc/unicode'
    descriptions = csv.reader(open(data), delimiter=';')
    request = re.compile(" ".join(argv[1:]), flags=re.I)
    for record in descriptions:
        if request.findall(record[1]):
            (code, descr) = record[:2]
            print(code, unichr(int(code,16)), descr)

    A bit about code and work. In general, there is a unicodedata module , but it allows you to search only by its full name. You could also do without CSV (for example, just use split (';')). The script apparently understands regular expressions. And yes, one could use grep, awk / sed, and then somehow pervert with the number (by the way, I’m not sure about the latter), but it’s easier to make python work under Windows than all these utilities. Since the application runs from the console, some characters may not be displayed depending on the font.

    Examples of using.
    $ python ./unicodesearch.py yat
    0462 Ѣ CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER YAT
    0463 ѣ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER YAT
    ...
    $ python ./unicodesearch.py "greek.*epsilon$"
    0395 Ε GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON
    03B5 ε GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON

    $ python ./unicodesearch.py heavy check mark
    2714 ✔ HEAVY CHECK MARK

    Also popular now: