unibits

Ruby library and CLI command that visualizes various Unicode and ASCII encodings in the terminal.

Helps you debugging and learning about Unicode encodings.

Supported encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-32LE, UTF-32BE, BINARY, ASCII

Setup

$ gem install unibits

Usage

From CLI

$ unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

From Ruby

require 'unibits/kernel_method'
unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

Options

unibits takes three optional options:

• encoding (e): The encoding of the given string (uses your default encoding if none given)
• convert (c): An encoding the string should be converted to before visualizing it
• stats: Whether to show a short stats header (default: true), you can deactivate on the CLI with --no-stats

Please note: This uses Ruby's built-in encoding support. Currently, only strings with valid encodings are supported.

Output for Different Encodings

UTF-8

CLI: $ unibits -e utf-8 -c utf-8 "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

Ruby: unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ", encoding: 'utf-8', convert: 'utf-8'

UTF-16LE

CLI: $ unibits -e utf-8 -c utf-8 "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

Ruby: unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ", encoding: 'utf-8', convert: 'utf-8'

UTF-16BE

CLI: $ unibits -e utf-8 -c utf-8 "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

Ruby: unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ", encoding: 'utf-8', convert: 'utf-8'

UTF-32LE

CLI: $ unibits -e utf-8 -c utf-8 "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

Ruby: unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ", encoding: 'utf-8', convert: 'utf-8'

UTF-32BE

CLI: $ unibits -e utf-8 -c utf-8 "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

Ruby: unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ", encoding: 'utf-8', convert: 'utf-8'

BINARY

CLI: $ unibits -e binary "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ"

Ruby: unibits "🌫 Idiosyncrätic ℜսᖯʏ", encoding: 'binary'

ASCII

CLI: $ unibits -e utf-8 -c ascii "ascii"

Ruby: unibits "ASCII String", encoding: 'utf-8', convert: 'ascii'

Notes

Also see

• UTF-8 (Wikipedia)
• UTF-16 (Wikipedia)
• UTF-32 (Wikipedia)
• Ruby's Encoding class
• Unicode Micro Libraries for Ruby

Lots of thanks to @damienklinnert for the motivation and inspiration required to build this! 🎆

Copyright (C) 2017 Jan Lelis http://janlelis.com. Released under the MIT license.