The Unicode Character Database (UCD) Tools is a set of Python tools and a C library. The Python tools are designed to support extracting and processing data from the text-based UCD source files, while the C library is designed to provide easy access to this information.

Data Files

The ucd-tools project provides support for UCD formatted data files from several different sources.

Unicode Character Database

The following Unicode Character Database files from the Unicode Consortium are supported:

Blocks
DerivedAge
PropList
PropertyValueAliases
Scripts
UnicodeData

ConScript Unicode Registry

If enabled, the following data from the ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR) is added:

Code Range	Script
`F8D0-F8FF`	Klingon

This data is located in the data/csur directory in a form compatible with the Unicode Character Data files.

C Library

The C library provides several different facilities that make use of the UCD data. It provides a compact and efficient representation of the different data tables.

Detailed documentation is provided in the src/include/ucd/ucd.h file in the Doxygen documentation format.

Querying Properties

The library exposes the following properties from the UCD data files:

Property	Description
`General_Category`	A General Category Value, including the higher-level grouping.
`Script`	An ISO 15924 script code.

Case Conversion

The following character conversion functions are provided:

ucd::tolower -- convert letters to lower case
ucd::totitle -- convert letters to title case (UCD extension)
ucd::toupper -- convert letters to upper case

NOTE: These functions use the simple case mapping algorithm. That is, they only ever map to a single character. This is to provide a compatible signature to the standard C wctype.h APIs.

wctype Compatibility

To facilitate working on platforms that don't have a useable wide-character ctypes library, or to provide a more consistent behaviour, the ucd-tools C library provides a set of APIs that are compatible with wctype.h.

The following character classification functions are provided:

ucd::isalnum
ucd::isalpha
ucd::iscntrl
ucd::isdigit
ucd::isgraph
ucd::islower
ucd::isprint
ucd::ispunct
ucd::isspace
ucd::isupper

NOTE: Equivalents for isblank and isxdigit are not provided.

Build Dependencies

In order to build ucd-tools, you need:

a functional autotools system (make, autoconf, automake and libtool);
a functional c++ compiler.

To build the documentation, you need:

the doxygen program to build the api documentation;
the dot program from the graphviz library to generate graphs in the api documentation.

Debian

Core Dependencies:

Dependency	Install
autotools	`sudo apt-get install make autoconf automake libtool`
c++ compiler	`sudo apt-get install gcc g++`

Documentation Dependencies:

Dependency	Install
doxygen	`sudo apt-get install doxygen`
graphviz	`sudo apt-get install graphviz`

Building

UCD Tools supports the standard GNU autotools build system. The source code does not contain the generated configure files, so to build it you need to run:

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make

The tests can be run by using:

make check

The program can be installed using:

sudo make install

The documentation can be built using:

make html

Updating the UCD Data

To re-generate the source files from the UCD data when a new version of unicode is released, you need to run:

./configure --prefix=/usr --with-unicode-version=VERSION
make ucd-update

where VERSION is the Unicode version (e.g. 6.3.0).

Additionally, you can use the UCD_FLAGS option to control how the data is generated. The following flags are supported:

Flag	Description
--with-csur	Add ConScript Unicode Registry data.

Bugs

Report bugs to the ucd-tools issues page on GitHub.

License Information

UCD Tools is released under the GPL version 3 or later license.