libgrapheme

Freestanding C library for unicode string handling
git clone https://git.sinitax.com/suckless/libgrapheme
Log | Files | Refs | README | LICENSE | sfeed.txt

commit 51eca9eff65def13d1370e32dad2988731d38e7d
parent cdb1c28f7f51e53d95bdb763ba2e3034fbe2585f
Author: Laslo Hunhold <dev@frign.de>
Date:   Sat, 10 Oct 2020 18:56:47 +0200

Refactor libgrapheme.7

It read more than a rant and didn't get to the point of what a manual
should do: Provide an overview. Still, I felt like adding a few
paragraphs on the motivation and added a section "BACKGROUND" for this
purpose.

The other manual pages will follow accordingly.

Signed-off-by: Laslo Hunhold <dev@frign.de>

Diffstat:
Mman/libgrapheme.7 | 106+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------------
1 file changed, 79 insertions(+), 27 deletions(-)

diff --git a/man/libgrapheme.7 b/man/libgrapheme.7 @@ -1,38 +1,90 @@ -.Dd 2020-03-26 +.Dd 2020-10-10 .Dt LIBGRAPHEME 7 .Os suckless.org .Sh NAME .Nm libgrapheme -.Nd grapheme cluster utility library +.Nd grapheme cluster detection library +.Sh SYNOPSIS +.In grapheme.h .Sh DESCRIPTION +The .Nm -is a C library for working with grapheme clusters. What are grapheme -clusters? In C, one usually uses 8-Bit unsigned integers (chars) to -store strings, and many people assume that one such char represents -one visible character in a printed output. +library provides functions to properly count characters +.Dq ( grapheme clusters ) +in Unicode strings using the Unicode grapheme +cluster breaking algorithm (UAX #29). .Pp -This is not true and only holds for encodings that map numbers from -0-255 to characters. Modern Unicode maps numbers ('code points') far -larger than that to characters. A common encoding to represent such -code points is UTF-8. A common misunderstanding is that a code -point represents a single printed character, which is not correct. -Instead, Unicode has a concept of so called 'grapheme clusters', which -are a set of one or more code points that in total make up one printed -character. -.Pp -To put it shortly: To count printed characters in a string, it is -neither enough to just count the chars nor to count the UTF-8 code points. -Instead, what is necessary is to apply a complex ruleset, specified -by Unicode, to determine if a set of code points belongs together in the -form of a grapheme cluster, which then counts as a single character. -.Pp -.Nm -is a suckless response to the bloated ecosystem of grapheme cluster -handling (e.g. ICU) and provides a simple interface for this complex -concept. The rules are automatically downloaded from unicode.org -and parsed and automatic testing is performed based on tests provided -by Unicode. +You can either count the characters in an UTF-8-encoded string (see +.Xr grapheme_len 3 ) +or determine if a grapheme cluster breaks between two code points (see +.Xr grapheme_boundary 3 ) , +while a safe UTF-8-de/encoder for the latter purpose is provided (see +.Xr grapheme_cp_decode 3 +and +.Xr grapheme_cp_encode 3 ) . .Sh SEE ALSO +.Xr grapheme_boundary 3 , +.Xr grapheme_cp_decode 3 , +.Xr grapheme_cp_encode 3 , .Xr grapheme_len 3 +.Sh STANDARDS +.Nm +is compliant with the Unicode 13.0.0 specification. +.Sh MOTIVATION +The idea behind every character encoding scheme like ASCII or Unicode +is to assign numbers to abstract characters. ASCII for instance, which +comprises the range 0 to 127, assigns the number 65 (0x41) to the +character +.Sq A . +This number is called a +.Dq code point , +and all code points of an encoding make up its so-called +.Dq code space . +.Pp +Unicode's code space is much larger, ranging from 0 to 0x10FFFF, but its +first 128 code points are identical to ASCII's. The additional code +points are needed as Unicode's goal is to express all writing systems +of the world. To give an example, the character +.Sq \[u00C4] +is not expressable in ASCII, as it lacks a code point for it. It can be +expressed in Unicode, though, as the code point 196 (0xC4) has been +assigned to it. +.Pp +At some point, when more and more characters were assigned to code +points, the Unicode Consortium (that defines the Unicode standard) +noticed a problem: Many languages have much more complex characters, +for example +.Sq \[u01DE] +(Unicode code point 0x1DE), which is an +.Sq A +with an umlaut and a macron, and it gets much more complicated in some +non-European languages. Instead of assigning a code point to each +modification of a +.Dq base character +(like +.Sq A +in this example here), they started introducing modifiers, which are +code points that would not correspond to characters but would modify a +preceding +.Dq base +character. For example, the code point 0x308 adds an umlaut and the +code point 0x304 adds a macron, so the code point sequence +.Dq 0x41 0x308 0x304 +represents the character +.Sq \[u01DE] , +just like the single code point 0x1DE. +.Pp +In many applications, it is necessary to count the number of characters +in a string. This is pretty simple with ASCII-strings, where you just +count the number of bytes. With Unicode-strings, it is a common mistake +to simply adapt the ASCII-approach and count the number of code points, +given, for example, the sequence +.Dq 0x41 0x308 0x304 , +while made up of 3 code points, only represents a single character. +.Pp +The proper way to count the number of characters in a Unicode string +is to apply the Unicode grapheme cluster breaking algorithm (UAX #29) +that is based on a complex ruleset and determines if a grapheme cluster +ends or is continued between two code points. .Sh AUTHORS .An Laslo Hunhold Aq Mt dev@frign.de