Find unicode characters based on their names
ugrep is essentially grep for the Unicode table. It prints out the resulting unicode characters literally, so you can easily cut-and-paste. Ugrep is useful for looking up Emojis 😤, finding obscure symbols ⚸⅗ℏ℞☧☭, or beautiful glyphs to decorate your text. 🙶❡✯🟔❢🙷
You can also use it for the reverse operation to lookup a single character (or a string of them) you've pasted into the terminal.
As a bonus, it can list which fonts are installed that contain a particular unicode character and — through the magic of sixels — will show a rendering in each font.
It's just a Python 3 shell script. Download it to /usr/local/bin or ~/bin
and make it executable.
cd /usr/local/bin
wget https://github.com/hackerb9/ugrep/raw/master/ugrep
chmod +x ugrep
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Search by name: ugrep [-w] regex
Look up a character name where regex is a regular expression. If you don't know regular expressions, don't worry. Just use plain strings and you'll rarely be wrong.
ugrep runicIf you find ugrep returning too many hits because the phrase you used is found in other terms, e.g., thema found in mathematical, use the -w option to limit the search to complete words.
-
Search by number: ugrep codepoint[..codepoint[..increment]]
Look up a character (or a range of them) using Unicode code points in hexadecimal. For example,
ugrep 03c0 ugrep 23b0..f ugrep 0..10ffff..1000 -
Search by character: ugrep [-c] character string
Look up each character in a string. Note that if the string is a single character, e.g.,
ugrep X, then -c is implied and need not be specified.ugrep -c "(ﾟ∀ﾟ)" -
List fonts for a character: ugrep [-l] character
After showing the usual character information, list installed fonts that contain that character and show an example in each:
ugrep -l mho☝ When
sshed to another machine,ugrepshows the fonts installed on the remote machine. -
List fonts, scaled larger: ugrep [-L scale] character
Same as
-l, but scale up the example rendering in each font to be easier to read:ugrep -L2 -w omUseful scale values range from 2 to 8.
Note: output from all examples has been excerpted. (You'd be amazed how many heart emojis Unicode has. 😜)
To see some useful and lovely glyphs, try this:
ugrep face
ugrep alchemical
ugrep ornament
ugrep bullet
ugrep '(vine|bud)'
ugrep vai
ugrep heavy
ugrep drawing
ugrep combining
$ ugrep heart
☙ U+2619 REVERSED ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET
❣ U+2763 HEAVY HEART EXCLAMATION MARK ORNAMENT
❤ U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART
⋮ [ ... truncated for brevity ... ]
💞 U+1F49E REVOLVING HEARTS
💟 U+1F49F HEART DECORATION
😍 U+1F60D SMILING FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES
😻 U+1F63B SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES
$ ugrep ☺
☺ U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE
$ ugrep right.*gle
$ ugrep right gle # Equivalent
» U+00BB RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
’ U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
∟ U+221F RIGHT ANGLE
⊿ U+22BF RIGHT TRIANGLE
$ ugrep -w '(wo|hu)?m(a|e)ns?'
ᛗ U+16D7 RUNIC LETTER MANNAZ MAN M
⛀ U+26C0 WHITE DRAUGHTS MAN
⛂ U+26C2 BLACK DRAUGHTS MAN
⼈ U+2F08 KANGXI RADICAL MAN
⼥ U+2F25 KANGXI RADICAL WOMAN
𝌂 U+1D302 DIGRAM FOR HUMAN EARTH
𝌄 U+1D304 DIGRAM FOR EARTHLY HUMAN
🕴 U+1F574 MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING
🕺 U+1F57A MAN DANCING
🚹 U+1F6B9 MENS SYMBOL
🚺 U+1F6BA WOMENS SYMBOL
🤰 U+1F930 PREGNANT WOMAN
🤵 U+1F935 MAN IN TUXEDO
$ ugrep ^x # Regex anchors ^ and $ work
⊻ U+22BB XOR
⌧ U+2327 X IN A RECTANGLE BOX (clear key)
$ ugrep -w R # The letter R used as a word
$ ugrep "\bR\b" # (regex equivalent)
R U+0052 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R
Ŗ U+0156 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH CEDILLA
ℛ U+211B SCRIPT CAPITAL R (Script r)
ℜ U+211C BLACK-LETTER CAPITAL R (Black-letter r)
ℝ U+211D DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL R (Double-struck r)
$ ugrep -c "ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ"
ᕕ U+1555 CANADIAN SYLLABICS FI
( U+0028 LEFT PARENTHESIS (opening parenthesis)
U+0020 SPACE
ᐛ U+141B CANADIAN SYLLABICS NASKAPI WAA
U+0020 SPACE
) U+0029 RIGHT PARENTHESIS (closing parenthesis)
ᕗ U+1557 CANADIAN SYLLABICS FO
$ ugrep backslash
\ U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (backslash)
$ ugrep 26b3..b
⚳ U+26B3 CERES
⚴ U+26B4 PALLAS
⚵ U+26B5 JUNO
⚶ U+26B6 VESTA
⚷ U+26B7 CHIRON
⚸ U+26B8 BLACK MOON LILITH
⚹ U+26B9 SEXTILE
⚺ U+26BA SEMISEXTILE
⚻ U+26BB QUINCUNX
$ ugrep 1f470..ff | less
👰 U+1F470 BRIDE WITH VEIL
👱 U+1F471 PERSON WITH BLOND HAIR
👲 U+1F472 MAN WITH GUA PI MAO
👳 U+1F473 MAN WITH TURBAN
👴 U+1F474 OLDER MAN
👵 U+1F475 OLDER WOMAN
👶 U+1F476 BABY
👷 U+1F477 CONSTRUCTION WORKER
👸 U+1F478 PRINCESS
👹 U+1F479 JAPANESE OGRE
👺 U+1F47A JAPANESE GOBLIN
👻 U+1F47B GHOST
👼 U+1F47C BABY ANGEL
👽 U+1F47D EXTRATERRESTRIAL ALIEN
⋮ [ ... truncated for brevity ... ]
📼 U+1F4FC VIDEOCASSETTE
📽 U+1F4FD FILM PROJECTOR
📾 U+1F4FE PORTABLE STEREO
📿 U+1F4FF PRAYER BEADS
Sometimes it's useful (or just fun) to page through the Unicode
table and see what characters are defined in a region. (`ugrep
2700..ff`) Ranges are convenient, but very slow. Use regular
expressions if you want speed. (`ugrep U+27..`)
$ ugrep 0..ffff..1000
� U+0000 <control> (null)
က U+1000 MYANMAR LETTER KA
[ ] U+2000 EN QUAD
[ ] U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE
䀀 U+4000 cups; small cups ( M: fàn, C: fan3 fan4 fan6 )
倀 U+5000 bewildered; rash, wildly ( M: chāng, C: caang1 caang4 coeng1 zaang1, J: KURUU TAORERU, K: CHANG, V: trành )
怀 U+6000 bosom, breast; carry in bosom ( M: huái, C: waai4 )
瀀 U+7000 [CJK Unified Ideographs] ( M: yōu, J: ATSUI )
耀 U+8000 shine, sparkle, dazzle; glory ( M: yào, C: jiu6, J: KAGAYAKU, K: YO )
退 U+9000 step back, retreat, withdraw ( M: tuì, C: teoi3, J: SHIRIZOKU SHIRIZOKERU, K: THOY, V: thoái )
ꀀ U+A000 YI SYLLABLE IT
뀀 U+B000 Block: [Hangul Syllables]
쀀 U+C000 Block: [Hangul Syllables]
퀀 U+D000 Block: [Hangul Syllables]
� U+E000 <Private Use, First>
U+F000 Block: [Private Use Area]
- Tip: pipe long output to
lessand search for a code point by pressing/U\+A60F.
ugrep -l swash amp
-
Requires FontConfig. (Most GNU/Linux boxes should already be set).
-
The requested character may also be displayed in each of the listed typefaces, but only if your terminal supports sixel graphics (e.g.,
xterm -ti vt340) and you have ImageMagick installed.
ugrep -L4 fdfd
﷽ U+FDFD ARABIC LIGATURE BISMILLAH AR-RAHMAN AR-RAHEEM
Aldhabi
Trutypewriter PolyglOTT
Unifont
- Note that increasing the glyph size also increased the text size.
Not all terminals are capable of "double height" text. If yours
shows two lines of the same text in the usual size, try using
--never-double-text.
$ ugrep -w space
[ ] U+0020 SPACE (SP)
[ ] U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE (non-breaking space) (NBSP)
[ ] U+1680 OGHAM SPACE MARK
[ ] U+2002 EN SPACE
[ ] U+2003 EM SPACE
[ ] U+2004 THREE-PER-EM SPACE
[ ] U+2005 FOUR-PER-EM SPACE
[ ] U+2006 SIX-PER-EM SPACE
[ ] U+2007 FIGURE SPACE
[ ] U+2008 PUNCTUATION SPACE
[ ] U+2009 THIN SPACE
[ ] U+200A HAIR SPACE
Whitespace characters are printed with square brackets around them to make it easy to highlight and copy them from the terminal. They will also be shown with a yellow background, if the terminal allows.
Ugrep shows the character name in all caps and aliases are usually lowercase in parentheses. Some aliases are treated differently. For aesthetic reasons, abbreviations are also shown in uppercase. For example:
� U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE (byte order mark) (BOM) (ZWNBSP)
There are 31 characters in Unicode which have the wrong name in the UnicodeData.txt database. Unicode includes the correct name as an alias in NameAliases.txt. If that file exists on your system, then ugrep will show the correction in Title Case Letters and in red letters, if the terminal supports color text.
︘ U+FE18 PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRAKCET (Presentation Form For Vertical Right White Lenticular Bracket)
Unicode does not actually define most CJK characters, except indirectly via Unihan, which maps certain blocks of characters to other standards.
-
Ugrep allows one to specify the code point or paste in an example character to look up.
$ ugrep 𰻞 𰻞 U+30EDE biangbiang noodles ( M: biáng ) $ ugrep 8000 耀 U+8000 shine, sparkle, dazzle; glory ( M: yào, C: jiu6, J: KAGAYAKU, K: YO )
$ ugrep .? | less
⋮ [ ... over 30,000 glyphs elided for brevity ... ]
- Want just Unicode glyphs without the description? Please use fonttable. It shows all defined Unicode characters by default.
$ ugrep 0..10FFFF | less
⋮ [ ... over a million lines elided for brevity ... ]
☝ This is currently very slow due to the way ugrep is implemented.
You likely want to use
fonttable -u instead.
Ugrep requires the Unicode data file UnicodeData.txt which can be installed on your system, in your home, or in the current directory.
Easiest: On Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux, simply apt install unicode-data.
Still easy: Or, you can download it by hand from
unicode.org
and place it in ~/.local/share/unicode/UnicodeData.txt
Not hard: Or, if you wish the file to be accessible to all users on
your machine, place it in /usr/local/share/unicode/UnicodeData.txt.
If the file Unihan_Readings.txt exists, then ugrep will
automatically use it to show an English gloss describing a character
in the CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) Ideographs region.
Your OS may make it easy to install (e.g., apt install unicode-data).
On other systems, you can do this
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/unicode
cd ~/.local/share/unicode
wget ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/Unihan.zip
unzip Unihan.zip
$ ugrep 8000
耀 U+8000 shine, sparkle, dazzle; glory ( M: yào, C: jiu6, J: KAGAYAKU, K: YO )
The parenthesized text at the end shows the romanized pronunciation of the character in Mandarin (pinyin), Cantonese (jyutping), Japanese (Hepburn), and Korean (Yale).
$ ugrep -c 「⿺辶⿳穴⿰月⿰⿲⿱幺長⿱言馬⿱幺長刂心」
「 U+300C LEFT CORNER BRACKET (opening corner bracket)
⿺ U+2FFA IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER SURROUND FROM LOWER LEFT
辶 U+8FB6 walk; walking; KangXi radical 162 ( M: chuò, J: SHINNYOU )
⿳ U+2FF3 IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER ABOVE TO MIDDLE AND BELOW
穴 U+7A74 cave, den, hole; KangXi radical 116 ( M: xué, C: jyut6, J: ANA, K: HYEL, V: huyệt )
⿰ U+2FF0 IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER LEFT TO RIGHT
月 U+6708 moon; month; KangXi radical 74 ( M: yuè, C: jyut6, J: TSUKI, K: WEL, V: nguyệt )
⿰ U+2FF0 IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER LEFT TO RIGHT
⿲ U+2FF2 IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER LEFT TO MIDDLE AND RIGHT
⿱ U+2FF1 IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER ABOVE TO BELOW
幺 U+5E7A one; tiny, small ( M: yāo, C: jiu1, J: CHIISAI, K: YO )
長 U+9577 long; length; excel in; leader ( M: zhǎng, C: coeng4 zoeng2, J: NAGAI TAKERU OSA, K: CANG, V: trường )
⿱ U+2FF1 IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER ABOVE TO BELOW
言 U+8A00 words, speech; speak, say ( M: yán, C: jin4, J: KOTO IU KOTOBA, K: EN UN, V: ngôn )
馬 U+99AC horse; surname; KangXi radical 187 ( M: mǎ, C: maa5, J: UMA, K: MA, V: mã )
⿱ U+2FF1 IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER ABOVE TO BELOW
幺 U+5E7A one; tiny, small ( M: yāo, C: jiu1, J: CHIISAI, K: YO )
長 U+9577 long; length; excel in; leader ( M: zhǎng, C: coeng4 zoeng2, J: NAGAI TAKERU OSA, K: CANG, V: trường )
刂 U+5202 knife; radical number 18 ( M: dāo, C: dou1, J: RITSUTOU, K: TO )
心 U+5FC3 heart; mind, intelligence; soul ( M: xīn, C: sam1, J: KOKORO, K: SIM, V: tâm )
」 U+300D RIGHT CORNER BRACKET (closing corner bracket)
Unihan calls the English gloss the character's "definition", but that is meant in a very loose sense. CJK characters change meaning based upon the context they are used in. For example, most Chinese words are made of two characters, such as "蜂鳥", which means "hummingbird", but ugrep would shows it as:
$ ugrep -c 蜂鳥
蜂 U+8702 bee, wasp, hornet ( M: fēng, C: fung1, J: HACHI, K: PONG, V: ong )
鳥 U+9CE5 bird; KangXi radical 196 ( M: niǎo, C: niu5, J: TORI, K: CO, V: điểu )
Unihan refers to this supplemental information — both the English gloss and the romanizations — as "readings". Readings are meant to be helpful, but are not normative and are only available for some characters.
| Count | Percent | |
|---|---|---|
| All CJK Characters | 93,858 | 100% |
| Have any reading | 47,429 | 51% |
| Mandarin Pinyin | 41,378 | 44% |
| Cantonese Jyutping | 23,112 | 25% |
| English definition | 21,076 | 23% |
| Japanese Hepburn | 11,293 | 12% |
| Korean Yale | 9,051 | 10% |
| Vietnamese | 8,301 | 9% |
$ ugrep 2bac3
𫫃 U+2BAC3 (Cant.) sarcastic interrogative ( C: e1 )
$ ugrep 20015
𠀕 U+20015 Variant of U+4E99 亙
$ ugrep 20016
𠀖 U+20016 [CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B] ( V: khạng )
$ ugrep 2abcd
𪯍 U+2ABCD [CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C]
Note that ugrep currently prints just the name of the block the character is in [within square brackets] if it has no better way to identify the character.
This is a rewrite of b9's AWK ugrep into Python. While AWK makes more
sense for what this program does (comparing fields based on regexps),
a rewrite was necessary because GNU awk, while plenty powerful, uses
\y for word edges instead of the standard \b. Gawk does this for
backwards compatibility with historic AWK, but lacks a way to disable
it for new scripts.
Switching to Python did have the benefit of allowing more powerful Perlesque regexes (not that anyone has requested that).
I do not use Python's unicodedata module because it is woefully
insufficient. It allows one to search by character name only by
specifying it fully and exactly: unicodedata.lookup("ROTATED HEAVY BLACK HEART BULLET").
Although I believe this ugrep existed first, there is now another
ugrep which is quite widely known
— with good reason as it looks pretty nifty — which hasnothing to do
with looking up Unicode characters. The 'U' appears to stand for
Ultra-fast as it is a very speedy grep with lots of bells and
whistles.
What shall this project's new name be? ug is also taken by the other
ugrep. How about ugre? It's an ugly, ogreish name, but it's probably
a safe bet nobody is going to use that name for something else.
Currently if Unihan_Readings.txt is installed — which is the default if
the user has done apt install unicode-data) — and the user requests a
character that is not in UnicodeData.txt, then the Readings data is
used to show information about the character. However, Unihan_Readings
could be used in the future for searching for characters to show.
Example data from Unihan_Readings for U+9B44 (魄):
U+9B44 kCantonese bok3 paak3 tok3
U+9B44 kDefinition vigor; body; dark part of moon
U+9B44 kHangul 백:0N
U+9B44 kHanyuPinlu pò(11)
U+9B44 kHanyuPinyin 74431.090:pò,bó,tuò
U+9B44 kJapaneseKun TAMASHII
U+9B44 kJapaneseOn HAKU BAKU
U+9B44 kKorean PAYK
U+9B44 kMandarin pò
U+9B44 kTGHZ2013 287.140:pò
U+9B44 kTang *pæk
U+9B44 kVietnamese phách
U+9B44 kXHC1983 0084.110:bó 0887.020:pò 1175.020:tuò
See UAX #38: Unicode Han Database.
Two levels of Unihan support:
- Show kDefinition if block name is CJK Ideographs
- Search Unihan_Readings when searching for a word. Possible example: $ ugrep mononoke 魅 U+9B45 MONONOKE BAKEMONO SUDAMA (kind of forest demon, elf)
Number 1 is finished and working, but number 2 may require a command line switch or some other way of enabling/disabling it as searching through the Readings file may be slow or cause other problems.
It looks like
NamesList.txt
might be useful to also parse as it allows multiple aliases for a
character. For example (from grep -B1 [=%] NamesList.txt):
0023 NUMBER SIGN
= pound sign, hash, crosshatch, octothorpe
002E FULL STOP
= period, dot, decimal point
--
002F SOLIDUS
= slash, virgule
1F70A ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR VINEGAR
= crucible; acid; distill; atrament; vitriol; red
sulfur; borax; wine; alkali salt; mercurius vivus,
quick silver
I'm not sure how useful this will be (who is going to look up the number sign by searching on "octothorpe"), but it'd be nice to be able to at least show them as aliases.
Also, NamesList.txt has a fascinating "cross reference" feature:
0021 EXCLAMATION MARK
= factorial
= bang
x (inverted exclamation mark - 00A1)
x (latin letter retroflex click - 01C3)
x (double exclamation mark - 203C)
x (interrobang - 203D)
x (heavy exclamation mark ornament - 2762)
How would one find the interrobang (‽) without such a cross reference?
Note that the NamesList.txt file actually starts with a warning not to parse it as it says it is generated mechanically from UnicodeData.txt plus "manually created annotations". However, those annotations are what is interesting about the file (the aliases and cross references) and there appears to be no other official source of that data.
-
ugrep 3400 shows the text defined in UnicodeData.txt, which states that it is "<CJK Ideograph Extension A, First>". Now that ugrep can show ideograph definitions using Unihan_Readings.txt, we should (probably) replace any string in angle brackets with more useful info.
-
Brace expansion is confusing because of needing to be quoted from the shell. It is supported for ranges (not sequences), but is not currently documented because usage is tricky and the functionality is not actually that helpful. For example, the following works:
ugrep {0..F}{0,4,8,C}00but is easier to understand using range expansion:
ugrep 0..FFFF..400 -
Range expansion and a seemingly equivalent regular expression search will give different results.
ugrep 0..FFFF..400 | wc -l 64 ugrep U+[0-9A-F][048C]00 | wc -l 22This is because regexes currently only return valid code points from the UnicodeData.txt file, whereas range expansions can generate code points which are in regions not directly defined by Unicode. For example, the range from U+4E00 to U+9FEF is a block of CJK Ideographs. Both are useful: regexes are blazingly fast, while range expansions have more functionality.
-
[Note: The following is not a problem for people who are willing to use vector fonts (truetype, opentype, postscript) that may be antialiased. Xterm uses fontconfig just fine.]
For bitmap fonts, Xterm (as of version 369) seems to be able to only use one font at a time, which means a single font must have all the glyphs you want shown. (Yes, you can have a second bitmap font for "wide" CJK, but that's still not enough.)
The author (hackerb9) currently prefers using the Neep bitmap font like so in
~/.Xresources:! Neep looks nice, has good unicode coverage. Requires xfonts-jmk. xterm*vt100.font : *neep-medium-r-normal--20*10646* ! Neep lacks Asian characters xterm*vt100.wideFont : *fixed-medium-r-normal-ja-18*10646*Neep has two major downsides. 1. It is a bitmap font with only one size well implemented, so you can't zoom in or out. 2. It is limited to 65536 characters, which means it cannot show characters outside of Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, such as new emojis. Neep can be installed on Debian GNU/Linux systems with
apt install xfonts-jmk. -
Mlterm appears to have the same single font limitation as Xterm. Also, it right aligns text that has even a single character in a right-to-left alphabet, such as Arabic, so the output from ugrep will look a little funny.
-
Gnome-terminal uses
font-config, so it has very nice Unicode support and can easily zoom in with Ctrl-+⃣ and Ctrl--⃣. Older versions had a bug where combining characters were combined with the following character instead of the previous, but this is now fixed.It does not support sixel graphics, so the -l option cannot show examples of the character in different fonts.
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