[Discuss] Unicode grep

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-04-29 21:02-0700 pw wrote:

> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> For more on unicode and unicode-enabled fonts, see links collected
>> at http://unifont.org/.

> How do you search for unicode strings though?
> How do you define them on the command line if your
> current keyboard layout and language are not the
> language you want to search in?

For the test I did, I used cut and paste which of course proves my KDE
desktop (for the cut and paste) and grep work with unicode. I presume all
the other convenient GNU command-line tools are unicode-aware as well.

However, cut and paste is not convenient in general so additional methods
are normally needed to switch back and forth quickly between language
scripts and also to enter data in scripts for languages with complex text
layout. IIRC, you will find such methods if you follow the links in the
above URL.  However, I never followed up with any of those methods since my
non-English language skills are almost non-existent, and I normally only use
unicode for such things as convenient plotting of mathematical symbols where
cut and paste methods work fine.

BTW, I highly recommend the gucharmap GUI for helping to figure out the
relationships between unicode index and glyphs for the fonts that are
installed on your system.  For example, you can cut and paste UTF8 from
that application to any other UTF8-aware application.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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