anyascii 0.1.4

Unicode to ASCII transliteration

Any-Ascii

Unicode to ASCII transliteration

Table of Contents

• Description
• Examples
• Background
• Implementations
  • CLI
  • Go
  • Java
  • Node.js
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Rust
• See Also

Description

Converts Unicode text to a reasonable representation using only ASCII.

For most characters in Unicode, Any-Ascii provides an ASCII-only replacement string. Text is converted character-by-character without considering the context. The mappings for each language are based on popular existing romanization schemes. Symbolic characters are converted based on their meaning or appearance. All ASCII characters in the input are left unchanged, every other character is replaced with printable ASCII characters. Unknown characters are removed.

Examples

Representative examples for different languages comparing the Any-Ascii output to the conventional romanization.

Language (Script)	Input	Output	Conventional
French (Latin)	René François Lacôte	Rene Francois Lacote	Rene Francois Lacote
German (Latin)	Großer Hörselberg	Grosser Horselberg	Grosser Hoerselberg
Vietnamese (Latin)	Trần Hưng Đạo	Tran Hung Dao	Tran Hung Dao
Norwegian (Latin)	Nærøy	Naeroy	Naroy
Ancient Greek (Greek)	Φειδιππίδης	Feidippidis	Pheidippides
Modern Greek (Greek)	Δημήτρης Φωτόπουλος	Dimitris Fotopoylos	Dimitris Fotopoulos
Russian (Cyrillic)	Борис Николаевич Ельцин	Boris Nikolaevich El'tsin	Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin
Arabic	دمنهور	dmnhwr	Damanhur
Hebrew	אברהם הלוי פרנקל	'vrhm hlvy frnkl	Abraham Halevi Fraenkel
Georgian	სამტრედია	samt'redia	Samtredia
Armenian	Աբովյան	Abovyan	Abovyan
Thai	สงขลา	sngkhla	Songkhla
Lao	ສະຫວັນນະເຂດ	sahvannaekhd	Savannakhet
Mandarin Chinese (Han)	深圳	ShenZhen	Shenzhen
Cantonese Chinese (Han)	深水埗	ShenShuiBu	Sham Shui Po
Korean (Hangul)	화성시	hwaseongsi	Hwaseong-si
Korean (Han)	華城市	HuaChengShi	Hwaseong-si
Japanese (Hiragana)	さいたま	saitama	Saitama
Japanese (Han)	埼玉県	QiYuXian	Saitama-ken
Japanese (Katakana)	トヨタ	toyota	Toyota
Unified English Braille (Braille)	⠠⠎⠁⠽⠀⠭⠀⠁⠛	^say x ag	Say it again
Bengali	ময়মনসিংহ	mymnsimh	Mymensingh
Gujarati	પોરબંદર	porbmdr	Porbandar
Hindi (Devanagari)	महासमुंद	mhasmumd	Mahasamund
Kannada	ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು	bemgluru	Bengaluru
Malayalam	കളമശ്ശേരി	klmsseri	Kalamassery
Punjabi (Gurmukhi)	ਜਲੰਧਰ	jlmdhr	Jalandhar
Odia	ଗଜପତି	gjpti	Gajapati
Sinhala	රත්නපුර	rtnpur	Ratnapura
Tamil	கன்னியாகுமரி	knniyakumri	Kanniyakumari
Telugu	శ్రీకాకుళం	srikakulm	Srikakulam

Symbols	Input	Output
Emojis	😎 👑 🍎	:sunglasses: :crown: :apple:
Misc.	☆ ♯ ♰ ⚄ ⛌	* # + 5 X
Letterlike	№ ℳ ⅋ ⅍	No M & A/S

Background

Unicode is the foundation for text in all modern software: it’s how all mobile phones, desktops, and other computers represent the text of every language. People are using Unicode every time they type a key on their phone or desktop computer, and every time they look at a web page or text in an application. *

Unicode is the universal character set, a global standard to support all the world's languages. It consists of 140,000+ characters used by 150+ scripts. It also contains various technical symbols, emojis, and other symbolic characters. Unicode characters are encoded into bytes using an encoding, typically UTF-8.

ASCII is the most compatible character set, established in 1967. It is a subset of Unicode and UTF-8 consisting of 128 characters using 7-bits. The printable characters are English letters, digits, and punctuation, with the remaining being control characters. All of the characters found on a standard US keyboard correspond to the printable ASCII characters.

... expressed only in the original non-control ASCII range so as to be as widely compatible with as many existing tools, languages, and serialization formats as possible and avoid display issues in text editors and source control. *

A language is represented in writing using characters from a specific script. A script can be alphabetic, logographic, syllabic, or something else. Some languages use multiple scripts: Japanese uses Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Some scripts are used by multiple languages: Han characters are used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Conversion into the Latin script used by English and ASCII is called romanization.

When converting text between languages there are multiple properties that can be preserved:

• Meaning: Translation replaces text with an equivalent in the target language with the same meaning. This relies heavily on context and automatic translation is extremely complicated.
• Appearance: Preserving the visual appearance of a character when converting between languages is rarely possible and requires readers to have knowledge of the source language.
• Sound: Orthographic transcription uses the spelling and pronunciation rules of the target language to produce text that a speaker of the target language will pronounce as accurately as possible to the original.
• Spelling: Transliteration converts each letter individually using predictable rules. A reversible transliteration allows for reconstruction of the original text by using unique mappings for each letter.

Clear to anyone, Romanization is for foreigners. Geographical names are Romanized to help foreigners find the place they intend to go to and help them remember cities, villages and mountains they visited and climbed. But it is Koreans who make up the Roman transcription of their proper names to print on their business cards and draw up maps for international tourists. Sometimes, they write the lyrics of a Korean song in Roman letters to help foreigners join in a singing session or write part of a public address (in Korean) in Roman letters for a visiting foreign VIP. In this sense, it is for both foreigners and the local public. The Romanization system must not be a code only for the native English-speaking community here but an important tool for international communication between Korean society, foreign residents in the country and the entire external world. If any method causes much confusion because it is unable to properly reflect the original sound to the extent that different words are transcribed into the same Roman characters too frequently, it definitely is not a good system. *

Implementations

Any-Ascii is implemented in 6 different programming languages.

CLI

$ anyascii άνθρωποι
anthropoi

Use cd rust && cargo build --release to build a native executable to rust/target/release/anyascii

Go

package main

import (
    "github.com/hunterwb/any-ascii"
)

func main() {
    s := anyascii.Transliterate("άνθρωποι")
    // anthropoi
}

Go 1.10+ Compatible

Java

String s = AnyAscii.transliterate("άνθρωποι");
// anthropoi

Java 6+ compatible

Available through JitPack

Maven

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>jitpack.io</id>
        <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.hunterwb</groupId>
    <artifactId>any-ascii</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.4</version>
</dependency>

Gradle

repositories {
    maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
}

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.hunterwb:any-ascii:0.1.4'
}

Node.js

const anyAscii = require('any-ascii');

const s = anyAscii('άνθρωποι');
// anthropoi

Node.js 4.0+ compatible

Install latest release: npm install any-ascii

Install pre-release: npm install hunterwb/any-ascii

Python

from anyascii import anyascii

s = anyascii('άνθρωποι')
#  anthropoi

Python 3.3+ compatible

Install latest release: pip install anyascii

Install pre-release: pip install https://github.com/hunterwb/any-ascii/archive/master.zip#subdirectory=python

Ruby

require 'any_ascii'

s = AnyAscii.transliterate('άνθρωποι')
# anthropoi

Ruby 2.0+ compatible

Install latest release: gem install any_ascii

Use pre-release:

# Gemfile
gem 'any_ascii', git: 'https://github.com/hunterwb/any-ascii', glob: 'ruby/any_ascii.gemspec'

Rust

use any_ascii::any_ascii;

let s = any_ascii("άνθρωποι");
// anthropoi

Rust 1.20+ compatible

Use latest release:

# Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
any_ascii = "0.1.4"

Use pre-release:

# Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
any_ascii = { git = "https://github.com/hunterwb/any-ascii" }

See Also

ALA-LC Romanization
BGN/PCGN Romanization
CC-CEDICT: Free Mandarin Chinese Dictionary
Compart: Unicode Charts
ICAO 9303: Machine Readable Passports
ISO 15919: Indic Romanization
ISO 9: Cyrillic Romanization
KNAB Romanization Systems
Sean M. Burke: Unidecode
Sean M. Burke: Unidecode, Perl Journal
South Korea: Revised Romanization
Thomas T. Pedersen: Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts
UNGEGN Romanization
Unicode CLDR: Transliteration Guidelines
Unicode: Emoji
Unicode: Unihan
Unified English Braille
Wikipedia: Romanization of Arabic
Wikipedia: Romanization of Armenian
Wikipedia: Romanization of Georgian
Wikipedia: Romanization of Greek
Wikipedia: Romanization of Hebrew
Wikipedia: Romanization of Japanese
Wikipedia: Romanization of Korean
Wikipedia: Romanization of Russian