Number of Chinese character components

[lancejpollard]

Hi there, this looks like an interesting project. I'm wondering if it involves coming up with a set of primitives/components/radicals/etc. that are building blocks of all chinese characters. I'm interested to know if you found a system to handle every character, or if there are still new characters you encounter which throw the framework for a loop -- that is, the framework wasn't able to account for it, for some new stroke or character component of some sort.

I'd also be interested to know of a list of such components if available. I'm not sure I see them included in the data directory.

Thank you.

[lancejpollard]

Wondering if you have somewhere also that describes any math behind it, such as how you know that subdividing the grid will allow for covering all possible ways a stroke might be on a Chinese character. I'd be really interested to know how that works.

[LingDong-]

Hi there! Thanks for your interest in the project.

Yes most characters can be broken down to a limited set of primitive components. By primitive component I mean a character whose definition does not contain that of any other character.

If a new character cannot be composed of existing primitive components, you can think of that character as a primitive component itself.

Most of these components are defined in the beginning of the rrpl.json file, but they're not delibrately organized yet. You can catch them with a regex such as "[123456780\-\|\(\)]+".

If you would just like to see a list of common radicals in the Chinese language, check out https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/部首#康熙部首讀音表, they're in the 2nd column of the table.

The way the code subdivides the gird is by counting the number of "parrallel" components. For example, in (A)-(B), component A and B each get 50% of horizontal space, while in (A)-(B)-(C), the components each get 1/3 of horizontal space, and in ((A)-(B))-(C), A and B each get 25% and C gets 50%.

I hope my explanation is helpful!