tangled-up-in-unicode

Tangled up in Unicode

This module provides access to character properties for all Unicode characters, from the Unicode Character Database (UCD) . This module provides an alternative to Python's standard library unicodedata. Tangled up in Unicode provides four main benefits compared to the standard library:

• The latest version of the Unicode database is used.
• Adds human-readable class names (Property value aliases).
• Extends the properties to use more potential of the database.
• UCD version independent of Python version (Python 3.6 has UCD 9.0, 3.7 has UCD 11.0.0, 3.8 has 12.0.1, 3.9 has 13.0.0)

Note that Python 3 added unicode support, but that this is different from the UCD. Unicode support handles storing and manipulating unicode characters, while this package aims to provide properties of specific characters.

Example

The default lookup in unicodedata for $:

Property	Value
Name	Dollar Sign
Category (Short)	Sc
Bidirectional (Short)	ET
Combining	0
Mirrored	0
East Asian Width (Short)	Na
Decomposition

Extra information provided by this package

Property	Value
Category Alias (Long)	Currency_Symbol
Bidirectional Alias (Long)	European_Terminator
East Asian Width Alias (Long)	Narrow
Script (Long)	Common
Script (Short)	Zyyy
Block (Long)	Basic_Latin
Block (Short)	ASCII
PropList	Pattern_Syntax
Uppercase Character
Lowercase Character
Titlecase Character

Properties comparison

Property	tangled-up-in-unicode	unicodedata
Name	☑	☑
Decimal	☑	☑
Digit	☑	☑
Numeric	☑	☑
Combining	☑ + alias	☑
Mirrored	☑	☑
Decomposition	☑	☑
Category	☑ + alias	☑
Bidirectional	☑ + alias	☑
East Asian Width	☑ + alias	☑
Script	☑ + alias	-
Block	☑ + alias	-
Age	☑ + alias	-
Binary Property Values	☑	-
Version	14.0.0 (latest)	12.0.1

Table 1: presence of properties is denoted by ☑ (Unicode Character 'BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK' (U+2611)).

Usage

import tangled_up_in_unicode as unicodedata

The package can be installed via pip:

pip install tangled-up-in-unicode

Performance

The module is written in Python. It can be compiled with Cython to gain competitive performance with the native library.

Unsupported features

Some of the features in unicodedata are not supported.

Feature	tangled-up-in-unicode	unicodedata
lookup	-	☑
normalize	-	☑
ucd_3_2_0	-	☑

Acknowledgements

Where possible, code and documentation of the original module are used. This repository is part of the Dylan Profiling project.