Unicode to ASCII transliteration
Project description
Any-Ascii
Unicode to ASCII transliteration
Table of Contents
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
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