chmap (formerly lcharmap)

A CLI utility to get information for Unicode characters.

What?

chmap is a little utility to get information on Unicode characters, such as its description, hexadecimal/octal representation, Unicode category, UTF-8 encoding, and more.

$ chmap -r 9-10,13935,255-258
codepoint  glyph  encoded     case   description
        9         9           other  character tabulation
       10         A           other  line feed (lf)
    13935  㙯     E3 99 AF    other  modifier letter chinese tone yin ping
      255  ÿ      C3 BF       lower  latin small letter y with diaeresis
      256  Ā      C4 80       upper  latin capital letter a with macron
      257  ā      C4 81       lower  latin small letter a with macron
      258  Ă      C4 82       upper  latin capital letter a with breve

chmap was inspired by the charmap.exe tool present in Windows XP and later.

Where?

Tarballs are available from GitHub releases for Linux-x86_64 and Linux-armv6l. Extract, cd, and run:

$ sudo ./install.sh /usr/local

Building from Source

Build dependencies

• a C99 compiler, GNU Make
• scdoc (manpage)

Download the latest source tarball from GitHub releases (chmap-v$VERSION.tar.xz), extract, and build:

# make clean install

How?

Run chmap with the -r flag (for range) to get info for a range of Unicode runes:

$ chmap -r 0-5
codepoint  glyph  encoded      case   description
        0                      other  null
        1         1            other  start of heading
        2         2            other  start of text
        3         3            other  end of text
        4         4            other  end of transmission
        5         5            other  enquiry

Example ranges: 0-1, 355-369, 34, 189-192,12,45-49.

You may also list info for a list of given characters with the -c flag:

$ chmap -c Lovecraft
codepoint  glyph  encoded      case   description
       76  L      4C           upper  latin capital letter l
      111  o      6F           lower  latin small letter o
      118  v      76           lower  latin small letter v
      101  e      65           lower  latin small letter e
       99  c      63           lower  latin small letter c
      114  r      72           lower  latin small letter r
       97  a      61           lower  latin small letter a
      102  f      66           lower  latin small letter f
      116  t      74           lower  latin small letter t

You can search for characters that match a regex, too, with the -s flag:

$ chmap -s '^latin.*capital letter z'                                                       
codepoint  glyph  encoded      case   description
       90  Z      5A           upper  latin capital letter z
      377  Ź      C5 B9        upper  latin capital letter z with acute
      379  Ż      C5 BB        upper  latin capital letter z with dot above
      381  Ž      C5 BD        upper  latin capital letter z with caron
      437  Ƶ      C6 B5        upper  latin capital letter z with stroke
      548  Ȥ      C8 A4        upper  latin capital letter z with hook
     7824  Ẑ      E1 BA 90     upper  latin capital letter z with circumflex
     7826  Ẓ      E1 BA 92     upper  latin capital letter z with dot below
     7828  Ẕ      E1 BA 94     upper  latin capital letter z with line below
    11371  Ⱬ      E2 B1 AB     upper  latin capital letter z with descender
    11391  Ɀ      E2 B1 BF     upper  latin capital letter z with swash tail
    42950  Ᶎ      EA 9F 86     upper  latin capital letter z with palatal hook

Adding the -l flag causes chmap to print more information:

$ chmap -l -r 13000                                                                         
codepoint    13000 0x32C8  0o31310
encoding     UTF8(E3 8B 88)
glyph        ㋈ (2 columns)
description  ideographic telegraph symbol for september
case         other
category     Symbol (other)

See man chmap for more.

Why?

I miss some Windows utilities.

I found chars, but it lacked several features which I'd like:

• A table-like output mode (which chmap has by default). This makes viewing many entries more comfortable in a short terminal.
• A category field to specify the Unicode category that the rune falls under.

Inspiration

• Window's charmap.exe
• Eric Raymond's ascii utility
• chars (https://github.com/antifuchs/chars)
• uniname from uniutils

License

This lame little utility is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE.md file for more information.