Fourmilab Unum

Fourmilab Unum a stand-alone utility program written in portable Perl which allows you to look up Unicode and HTML characters by name or number, and interconvert numbers in decimal, hexadecimal, and octal bases. It contains a complete Unicode character database and allows query by code point, character block, or name. A separate database of all HTML named character entities, including alternative names and entities composed of multiple Unicode code points, allows lookup by name or code. For complete documentation see the Unum home page at Fourmilab, a copy of which is included in this repository.

All of this software is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Please see LICENSE.md in this repository for details.

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NAME

unum - Interconvert numbers, Unicode, and HTML/XHTML characters

SYNOPSIS

unum argument...

DESCRIPTION

The unum program is a command line utility which allows you to convert decimal, octal, hexadecimal, and binary numbers; Unicode character and block names; and HTML/XHTML character reference names and numbers into one another. It can be used as an on-line special character reference for Web authors.

Arguments

The command line may contain any number of the following forms of argument.

• 123

  Decimal number.

• 0371

  Octal number preceded by a zero.

• 0x1D351

  Hexadecimal number preceded by 0x. Letters may be upper or lower case, but the x must be lower case.

• 0b110101

  Binary number.

• b=block

  Unicode character blocks matching block are listed. The block specification may be a regular expression. For example, b=greek lists all Greek character blocks in Unicode.

• c=char...

  The Unicode character codes for the characters char... are listed. If the first character is not a decimal digit and the second not an equal sign, the c= may be omitted.

• h=entity

  List all HTML/XHTML character references matching entity, which may be a regular expression. Matching is case-insensitive, so h=alpha finds both Α and α. If the reference is composed of multiple Unicode code points, the components are printed after the name of the composed character reference.

• '&#number;&#x_hexnum_;...'

  List the characters corresponding to the specified HTML/XHTML character entities, which may be given in either decimal or hexadecimal. Note that the "x" in XHTML entities must be lower case. On most Unix-like operating systems, you'll need to quote the argument so the ampersand, octothorpe, and semicolon aren't interpreted by the shell.

• l=block

  List all Unicode blocks matching block and all characters within each block; l=goth lists the Gothic block and the 32 characters it contains.

• n=name

  List all Unicode character whose names match name, which may be a regular expression. For example, n=telephone finds the twelve Unicode characters for telephone symbols.

• utf8=number

  Treating the number (which may be specified as either decimal, octal, hexadecimal, or binary, as for numeric arguments) as a stream of from one to four bytes, decode the bytes as the UTF-8 representation of a character. For example, the specification "utf8=0xE298A2" decodes to Unicode code point 0x2622, the radioactive sign.

Options

• --nent

  When showing an HTML character reference, always show its numerical form (for example, —), even if it has a named character reference.

• --utf8

  Show UTF-8 encoding of characters as a byte sequence in a hexadecimal number. This is the same format as is accepted by the utf8= argument. The option applies to the display of all arguments which follow on the command line.

Output

For number or character arguments, the value(s) are listed in all of the input formats, save binary.

Octal  Decimal      Hex        HTML    Character   Unicode
  056       46     0x2E    .    "."         FULL STOP

If the terminal font cannot display the character being listed, the "Character" field will contain whatever default is shown in such circumstances. Control characters are shown as a Perl hexadecimal escape. If multiple HTML named character references map to the same Unicode code point, all are shown separated by commas.

Unicode blocks are listed as follows:

  Start        End  Unicode Block
 U+2460 -   U+24FF  Enclosed Alphanumerics
U+1D400 -  U+1D7FF  Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols