uniscribe | Describe the Unicode

Describes Unicode characters with their name and shows compositions.

Helps you understand how glyphs and codepoints are structured within the data
Gives you the names of glyphs and codepoints, which can be used for further research
Highlights invalid/special/blank codepoints

Uses a similar color coding like its lower-level companion tool unibits.

Setup

Make sure you have Ruby installed and installing gems works properly. Then do:

$ gem install uniscribe

Usage

Pass the string to debug to uniscribe:

From CLI

$ uniscribe "test strı̈ng"

From Ruby

require "uniscribe/kernel_method"
uniscribe "test strı̈ng"

Output


0074 ├─ t       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER T
0065 ├─ e       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER E
0073 ├─ s       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER S
0074 ├─ t       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER T
0020 ├─ ] [     ├─ SPACE
0073 ├─ s       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER S
0074 ├─ t       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER T
0072 ├─ r       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER R
---- ├┬ ı̈        ├┬ Composition
0131 │├─ ı       │├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I
0308 │└─ ◌̈        │└─ COMBINING DIAERESIS
006E ├─ n       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER N
0067 ├─ g       ├─ LATIN SMALL LETTER G

Examples

Tamil

>> uniscribe "நகரத்தில்"

Screenshot Tamil

Thai

>> uniscribe "ม้าลายหกตัว"

Screenshot Thai

Ideographic Variations

>> uniscribe "辻󠄀㚑󠄁"

Screenshot Ideographic Variations

(the variation is not visible in the screenshot, because my system does not render it correctly)

Emoji Sequences

>> uniscribe "3️⃣🤸‍♀"

Lots of Combining Marks

>> uniscribe "̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍"

Screenshot Marks

Random Sequences of some Special Unicode Codepoints

>> uniscribe "\0A\u{E01D7}\x7F\r\n\u{D0000}\u{81}\u{FFF9}B\u{FFFB}🏴\u{E0061}\u{E007F}\u{10FFFF}"

Screenshot Strange

Some Blanks

>> uniscribe "ᅠ ⁬𝅸"

Screenshot Blanks

Notes

Although the gem is generally up to date with Unicode 12, the proper detection of compositions / graphemes / combined characters depends on your Ruby version:

Ruby	Unicode Version
2.6	11.0.0
2.5	10.0.0
2.4	9.0.0
2.3	8.0.0
2.2	7.0.0
2.1	6.1.0

You can run uniscribe -v to check for the Unicode level of your uniscribe version.

Also see

CLI: unibits - visualizes Unicode encodings
CLI: unicopy - copy codepoints to clipboard
Website: character.construction - lists notable codepoints
Ruby Library: symbolify - used for safely printing individual codepoints
Ruby Library: characteristics - used for detecting blanks and similar
Unicode® Standard Annex #29: Unicode Text Segmentation
Talk: Ten Unicode Characters You Should Know About as a Programmer