character

This is a tool for various manipulations on characters, as characters rather than full strings, to show names, encodings and more.

The tool is structured as a top-level command, options, and sub-commands which can do different things. Many sub-commands will take a -v verbose option, which gives more detail in a pretty-printed table.

$ character help
[... lists all available sub-commands ...]
$ character version
[...]
$ character search check
[... table of results; search is convenience alias ...]
$ character name ✓
CHECK MARK
$ character named -h
[...]
$ character named 'CHECK MARK'
✓
$ character named -j CHECK MARK
✓
$ character named -v/ check
[... table of results of substring search ...]
$ character browse -b 'Alchemical Symbols'
[... table of results; browse is always a table ...]
$ character transform fraktur Hello world
ℌ𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔬 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔩𝔡
$ character named -1c 'INFORMATION DESK PERSON' \
    'EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-5'
💁🏾

In the last example, note that -c copies to clipboard; using -vc shows the results in a table but copies only the characters to the clipboard. Without --oneline (-1) each non-verbose character is shown on its own line. In this example we're using an emoji modifier which needs to immediately follow the modified character, so -1c should show you the same thing that is copied to the clipboard where -c on its own would show you the individual parts while copying the modified/combined whole to the clipboard.

Licensed under a MIT-style license.
Accumulated licenses of all dependencies are available too.
Patches welcome.

Building

Run: go build

Assuming defaults, install into ~/go/bin/ with: go build

This software uses Go Modules and requires a sufficiently recent version of Go. Clone this repo anywhere, don't worry about $GOPATH or such things (assuming Go 1.12 or newer).

If you are on an older Go, look for the last release in the v0.3.x series.

WASM

Run: ./util/make_wasm.sh

A directory wasm will be created; the character binary will be compiled into there as main.wasm; a supporting HTML page will be copied in, as well as the Golang wasm_exec.js support page.

Run a web-server which serves up the content of the wasm/ directory and see how it works. We should perhaps have a way to default to verbose mode (for tables) to better support this use-case.

SECURITY NOTE: Note: to have tables work, I switched from innerText to innerHTML, but this early proof-of-concept is not escaping output to be proof against HTML injection attacks. In particular, an unknown command will be echo'd back in the error message, as is fairly common for Unix CLI tools. We could use a separate output area for errors and use innerText for that, but that doesn't solve, eg, the output of transform commands which deliberately make reversible changes to input and displays it.

So don't put this up somewhere public, at least not in a domain with access to any cookies or other credentials worth stealing. But it's a useful toy to explore with. Well, it was for me: "My First WASM".

Table packages

Rendering content to tables requires a table package. We default to my own package, go.pennock.tech/tabular. We originally used github.com/apcera/termtables and briefly tried github.com/olekukonko/tablewriter before switching to writing my own.

(Apcera's repositories have disappeared, the most widespread fork of termtables appears to be github.com/xlab/tablewriter).

You can use Go build tags to switch the table package used. I might remove support for this in the future.

Alternatives

• uni by Martin Tournoij: https://github.com/arp242/uni, go get arp242.net/uni