.NET Unicode Information Library

Summary

This projects provides access to some of the data contained in the Unicode Character Database by the means of a portable .NET assembly. Included, is a small WPF application allowing to inspect the Unicode code points composing a specified text.

Compiling and using the project

Using the UnicodeInformation library

Using the library is as easy as including it in your project. You will find all the good stuff in the System.Unicode namespace.

Let's see a simple example:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Unicode;

namespace Example
{
	internal static class Program
	{
		private static void Main()
		{
			Console.OutputEncoding = Encoding.Unicode;
			PrintCodePointInfo('A');
			PrintCodePointInfo('∞');
			PrintCodePointInfo(0x1F600);
		}

		private static void PrintCodePointInfo(int codePoint)
		{
			var charInfo = UnicodeInfo.GetCharInfo(codePoint);
			Console.WriteLine(UnicodeInfo.GetDisplayText(charInfo));
			Console.WriteLine("U+" + codePoint.ToString("X4"));
			Console.WriteLine(charInfo.Name ?? charInfo.OldName);
			Console.WriteLine(charInfo.Category);
		}
	}
}

This example shows a few usages of the library. It gets information on a specific code point, queries the library for the text to display for the specific character (usually the character itself), and displays the character's name and category.

Details

In its current state, the project is written in C# 6, compilable by Roslyn, and targets the .NET 4.5 framework. The core of the project, UnicodeInformation.dll, is a portable class library usable for either regular .NET or Windows 8 applications. This library includes a subset of the official Unicode Character Database (Version 7.0 at the time of writing) stored in a custom file format.

Included Properties

From UCD

• Name
• General_Category
• Canonical_Combining_Class
• Bidi_Class
• Decomposition_Type
• Decomposition_Mapping
• Numeric_Type (*)
• Numeric_Value
• Bidi_Mirrored
• Unicode_1_Name
• Simple_Uppercase_Maping
• Simple_Lowercase_Mapping
• Simple_Titlecase_Mapping
• Block
• ASCII_Hex_Digit
• Bidi_Control
• Dash
• Deprecated
• Diacritic
• Extender
• Hex_Digit
• Hyphen
• Ideographic
• IDS_Binary_Operator
• IDS_Trinary_Operator
• Join_Control
• Logical_Order_Exception
• Noncharacter_Code_Point
• Other_Alphabetic
• Other_Default_Ignorable_Code_Point
• Other_Grapheme_Extend
• Other_ID_Continue
• Other_ID_Start
• Other_Lowercase
• Other_Math
• Other_Uppercase
• Pattern_Syntax
• Pattern_White_Space
• Quotation_Mark
• Radical
• Soft_Dotted
• STerm
• Terminal_Punctuation
• Unified_Ideograph
• Variation_Selector
• White_Space
• Lowercase
• Uppercase
• Cased
• Case_Ignorable
• Changes_When_Lowercased
• Changes_When_Uppercased
• Changes_When_Titlecased
• Changes_When_Casefolded
• Changes_When_Casemapped
• Alphabetic
• Default_Ignorable_Code_Point
• Grapheme_Base
• Grapheme_Extend
• Grapheme_Link
• Math
• ID_Start
• ID_Continue
• XID_Start
• XID_Continue

NB: The UCD property ISO_Comment will never be included since this one is empty in all new Unicode versions.

From Unihan

• kAccountingNumeric
• kOtherNumeric
• kPrimaryNumeric
• kDefinition
• kMandarin
• kCantonese
• kJapaneseKun
• kJapaneseOn
• kKorean
• kHangul
• kVietnamese
• kSimplifiedVariant
• kTraditionalVariant

Regenerating the data

The project UnicodeInformation.Builder takes cares of generating a file named ucd.dat. This file contains Unicode data compressed by .NET's deflate algorithm, and should be included in UnicodeInformation.dll at compilation.