python has this nice unicodedata module that deals with unicode nicely.
#-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# python
from unicodedata import *
# each unicode char has a unique name.
# one can use the âlookupâ func to find it
mychar=lookup('greek cApital letter sIgma')
# note letter case doesn't matter
print mychar.encode('utf-8')
m=lookup('CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5929')
# for some reason, case must be right here.
print m.encode('utf-8')
# to find a char's name, use the ânameâ function
print name(u'å')
basically, in unicode, each char has a number of attributes (called
properties) besides its name. These attributes provides necessary info
to form letters, words, or processing such as sorting, capitalization,
etc, of varous human scripts. For example, Latin alphabets has two
forms of upper case and lower case. Korean alphabets are stacked
together. While many symbols corresponds to numbers, and there are also
combining forms used for example to put a bar over any letter or
character. Also some writings systems are directional. In order to form
these symbols for display or process them for computing, info of these
on each char is necessary.
the rest of functions in unicodedata return these attributes.
see unicodedata doc:
http://python.org/doc/2.4/lib/module-unicodedata.html
Official word on unicode character properties:
http://www.unicode.org/uni2book/ch04.pdf
--
i don't know what's the state of Perl's unicode. Is there something
similar?
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