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---
libgrapheme.sh (6347B)
---
1 cat << EOF
2 .Dd ${MAN_DATE}
3 .Dt LIBGRAPHEME 7
4 .Os suckless.org
5 .Sh NAME
6 .Nm libgrapheme
7 .Nd unicode string library
8 .Sh SYNOPSIS
9 .In grapheme.h
10 .Sh DESCRIPTION
11 The
12 .Nm
13 library provides functions to properly handle Unicode strings according
14 to the Unicode specification in regard to character, word, sentence and
15 line segmentation and case detection and conversion.
16 .Pp
17 Unicode strings are made up of user-perceived characters (so-called
18 .Dq grapheme clusters ,
19 see
20 .Sx MOTIVATION )
21 that are composed of one or more Unicode codepoints, which in turn
22 are encoded in one or more bytes in an encoding like UTF-8.
23 .Pp
24 There is a widespread misconception that it was enough to simply
25 determine codepoints in a string and treat them as user-perceived
26 characters to be Unicode compliant.
27 While this may work in some cases, this assumption quickly breaks,
28 especially for non-Western languages and decomposed Unicode strings
29 where user-perceived characters are usually represented using multiple
30 codepoints.
31 .Pp
32 Despite this complicated multilevel structure of Unicode strings,
33 .Nm
34 provides methods to work with them at the byte-level (i.e. UTF-8
35 .Sq char
36 arrays) while also offering codepoint-level methods.
37 Additionally, it is a
38 .Dq freestanding
39 library (see ISO/IEC 9899:1999 section 4.6) and thus does not depend on
40 a standard library. This makes it easy to use in bare metal environments.
41 .Pp
42 Every documented function's manual page provides a self-contained
43 example illustrating the possible usage.
44 .Sh SEE ALSO
45 .Xr grapheme_decode_utf8 3 ,
46 .Xr grapheme_encode_utf8 3 ,
47 .Xr grapheme_is_character_break 3 ,
48 .Xr grapheme_is_lowercase 3 ,
49 .Xr grapheme_is_lowercase_utf8 3 ,
50 .Xr grapheme_is_titlecase 3 ,
51 .Xr grapheme_is_titlecase_utf8 3 ,
52 .Xr grapheme_is_uppercase 3 ,
53 .Xr grapheme_is_uppercase_utf8 3 ,
54 .Xr grapheme_next_character_break 3 ,
55 .Xr grapheme_next_character_break_utf8 3 ,
56 .Xr grapheme_next_line_break 3 ,
57 .Xr grapheme_next_line_break_utf8 3 ,
58 .Xr grapheme_next_sentence_break 3 ,
59 .Xr grapheme_next_sentence_break_utf8 3 ,
60 .Xr grapheme_next_word_break 3 ,
61 .Xr grapheme_next_word_break_utf8 3 ,
62 .Xr grapheme_to_lowercase 3 ,
63 .Xr grapheme_to_lowercase_utf8 3 ,
64 .Xr grapheme_to_titlecase 3 ,
65 .Xr grapheme_to_titlecase_utf8 3
66 .Xr grapheme_to_uppercase 3 ,
67 .Xr grapheme_to_uppercase_utf8 3 ,
68 .Sh STANDARDS
69 .Nm
70 is compliant with the Unicode ${UNICODE_VERSION} specification.
71 .Sh MOTIVATION
72 The idea behind every character encoding scheme like ASCII or Unicode
73 is to express abstract characters (which can be thought of as shapes
74 making up a written language). ASCII for instance, which comprises the
75 range 0 to 127, assigns the number 65 (0x41) to the abstract character
76 .Sq A .
77 This number is called a
78 .Dq codepoint ,
79 and all codepoints of an encoding make up its so-called
80 .Dq code space .
81 .Pp
82 Unicode's code space is much larger, ranging from 0 to 0x10FFFF, but its
83 first 128 codepoints are identical to ASCII's. The additional code
84 points are needed as Unicode's goal is to express all writing systems
85 of the world.
86 To give an example, the abstract character
87 .Sq \[u00C4]
88 is not expressible in ASCII, given no ASCII codepoint has been assigned
89 to it.
90 It can be expressed in Unicode, though, with the codepoint 196 (0xC4).
91 .Pp
92 One may assume that this process is straightforward, but as more and
93 more codepoints were assigned to abstract characters, the Unicode
94 Consortium (that defines the Unicode standard) was facing a problem:
95 Many (mostly non-European) languages have such a large amount of
96 abstract characters that it would exhaust the available Unicode code
97 space if one tried to assign a codepoint to each abstract character.
98 The solution to that problem is best introduced with an example: Consider
99 the abstract character
100 .Sq \[u01DE] ,
101 which is
102 .Sq A
103 with an umlaut and a macron added to it.
104 In this sense, one can consider
105 .Sq \[u01DE]
106 as a two-fold modification (namely
107 .Dq add umlaut
108 and
109 .Dq add macron )
110 of the
111 .Dq base character
112 .Sq A .
113 .Pp
114 The Unicode Consortium adapted this idea by assigning codepoints to
115 modifications.
116 For example, the codepoint 0x308 represents adding an umlaut and 0x304
117 represents adding a macron, and thus, the codepoint sequence
118 .Dq 0x41 0x308 0x304 ,
119 namely the base character
120 .Sq A
121 followed by the umlaut and macron modifiers, represents the abstract
122 character
123 .Sq \[u01DE] .
124 As a side-note, the single codepoint 0x1DE was also assigned to
125 .Sq \[u01DE] ,
126 which is a good example for the fact that there can be multiple
127 representations of a single abstract character in Unicode.
128 .Pp
129 Expressing a single abstract character with multiple codepoints solved
130 the code space exhaustion-problem, and the concept has been greatly
131 expanded since its first introduction (emojis, joiners, etc.). A sequence
132 (which can also have the length 1) of codepoints that belong together
133 this way and represents an abstract character is called a
134 .Dq grapheme cluster .
135 .Pp
136 In many applications it is necessary to count the number of
137 user-perceived characters, i.e. grapheme clusters, in a string.
138 A good example for this is a terminal text editor, which needs to
139 properly align characters on a grid.
140 This is pretty simple with ASCII-strings, where you just count the number
141 of bytes (as each byte is a codepoint and each codepoint is a grapheme
142 cluster).
143 With Unicode-strings, it is a common mistake to simply adapt the
144 ASCII-approach and count the number of code points.
145 This is wrong, as, for example, the sequence
146 .Dq 0x41 0x308 0x304 ,
147 while made up of 3 codepoints, is a single grapheme cluster and
148 represents the user-perceived character
149 .Sq \[u01DE] .
150 .Pp
151 The proper way to segment a string into user-perceived characters
152 is to segment it into its grapheme clusters by applying the Unicode
153 grapheme cluster breaking algorithm (UAX #29).
154 It is based on a complex ruleset and lookup-tables and determines if a
155 grapheme cluster ends or is continued between two codepoints.
156 Libraries like ICU and libunistring, which also offer this functionality,
157 are often bloated, not correct, difficult to use or not reasonably
158 statically linkable.
159 .Pp
160 Analogously, the standard provides algorithms to separate strings by
161 words, sentences and lines, convert cases and compare strings.
162 The motivation behind
163 .Nm
164 is to make unicode handling suck less and abide by the UNIX philosophy.
165 .Sh AUTHORS
166 .An Laslo Hunhold Aq Mt [email protected]
167 EOF
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