UNICODE(1)

💖 UNICODE(1) 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, because this is the General Commands Manual page for unicode and she is iconic ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

unicode — a command line unicode database query tool. that's it. that's the whole job. she queries the unicode database from your terminal and she does it beautifully 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

unicode [options] string

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

This manual page documents the unicode command. yes literally, that's the sentence, we're keeping it.

unicode is a command line unicode database query tool. no cap. you give her a string, she tells you what it is, which codepoints it's giving, and all the little secrets the Unicode Consortium wrote down about it 👑

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

so many options. all of them. every single one. let's go 🫶

• -h, --help — Show help and exit. she's helpful like that 💖
• -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 Python 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). she's psychic actually 🔮
• -fFILE, --input_file=FILE — Read characters from FILE and display information about each of them. Use - to read from standard input. streaming queen.
• -mMAXCOUNT, --max=MAXCOUNT — Maximal number of codepoints to display, default: 20; use 0 for unlimited. go feral, bestie, set it to 0 😤
• -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. manifesting a correct locale for you 🙏
• --fcp=CHARSET, --fromcp=CHARSET — Convert numerical arguments from this encoding, default: no conversion. Multibyte encodings are supported. This is ignored for non-numerical arguments. she said "multibyte" and meant it 💀
• -cADDCHARSET, --charset-add=ADDCHARSET — Show hexadecimal reprezentation of displayed characters in this additional charset. (yes "reprezentation", we're keeping her typo, it's part of the lore 💜)
• -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. sad beige terminal behaviour but valid
  • --colour=auto will test if standard output is a tty, and use colours only when it is. she checks the vibe first ✨
  • --color is a synonym of --colour (american spelling girlies we see you 🫶)
• -v, --verbose — Be more verbose about displayed characters, e.g. display Unihan information, if available. she will overshare and you will love it
• -w, --wikipedia — Spawn browser pointing to English Wikipedia entry about the character. research era.
• --wt, --wiktionary — Spawn browser pointing to English Wiktionary entry about the character.
• --brief — Display character information in brief format. girl dinner but for codepoints 🍓
• --format=fmt — Use your own format for character information display. See the README for details. (go read the README, iykyk 📖)
• --list — List (approximately) all known encodings. "approximately" bestie, she's not gonna count them for you 😭
• --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) 🇬🇧 truly the funniest option in any manpage, no notes 💀

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👑 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'

four ways to ask the same question and all of them ate 💅

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

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😭 BUGS 😭

Tabular format does not deal well with full-width, combining, control and RTL characters. she's trying her best okay, those characters are just built different 🙈

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

ascii(1)

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🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

Radovan Garabík <garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk> — the icon, the legend, the moment 👑

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this version is 2003-01-31 coded, from the UNICODE(1) era, and it still slays harder than most modern manpages. go run unicode on something cursed and think of me 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅🫶