character

This is a tool for various manipulations on characters, as characters rather than full strings, to show names, encodings and more.

The tool is structured as a top-level command, options, and sub-commands which can do different things. Many sub-commands will take a -v verbose option, which gives more detail in a pretty-printed table.

$ character help
[... lists all available sub-commands ...]
$ character version
[...]
$ character name ✓
CHECK MARK
$ character named -h
[...]
$ character named 'CHECK MARK'
✓
$ character named -j CHECK MARK
✓
$ character named -v/ check
[... table of results of substring search ...]
$ character browse -b 'Alchemical Symbols'
[... table of results; browse is always a table ...]
$ character transform fraktur Hello world
ℌ𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔬 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔩𝔡
$ character named -1c 'INFORMATION DESK PERSON' \
    'EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-5'
💁🏾

In the last example, note that -c copies to clipboard; using -vc shows the results in a table but copies only the characters to the clipboard. Without --oneline (-1) each non-verbose character is shown on its own line. In this example we're using an emoji modifier which needs to immediately follow the modified character, so -1c should show you the same thing that is copied to the clipboard where -c on its own would show you the individual parts while copying the modified/combined whole to the clipboard.

Licensed under a MIT-style license.
Accumulated licenses of all dependencies are available too.
Patches welcome.

Building

This code should be go get compatible, if you don't care about versions of library dependencies which have been confirmed to work. If you encounter problems, please try one of the vendored library mechanisms listed below instead.

So go get github.com/philpennock/character should download and install the tool into the bin dir inside the first directory listed in $GOPATH, which defaults to being $HOME/go.

With no Go environment variables set, that go command should thus give you an output executable at $HOME/go/bin/character.

GOPATH avoidance

At present, we require that the code be checked out "correctly", per Go, which probably means (if you've not set Go-specific environment variables, etc) that it should be checked out into ~/go/src/github.com/philpennock/character/.

We had some shuffle logic, I've removed it. If this affects you, please open an issue.

My intention is to move to Go's new workspace system, when that's published, which gets rid of the need for GOPATH, as this is an end tool.

Dependencies and vendoring.

The dependent code is not checked into this repository, for various philosophical reasons which I hold to be good. If one of the dependencies disappears, please file an Issue and I'll take care of managing the dependency.

This is Golang, the binaries shouldn't be built live from source in Production, it's acceptable for the disappearance of a project to make the code briefly harder to compile. Reproducible builds are only guaranteed for official non-git releases, which will include all dependencies.

Specifics available below, after the Building sub-section

Building

Two simple options, in preference order:

1. Run make (or gmake) -- using GNU make, build with any extra steps such as embedding version identifiers in the resulting binary.
2. Run go build -- idiomatic Go, should always work.

You're done.

go get

This is the "roll the dice and gamble" approach, which usually works, but not always. Just fetch the current dependencies, whatever version they might be, and build.

$ go get -v

And then build.

godep

dep is a vendor-locking tool which uses human directives in Gopkg.toml to let the maintainer update known versions in the tooling file Gopkg.lock, which is used to check out content and make it available in the vendor directory.

Note that dep ensure checks out the repositories in a common area, ~/go/pkg/dep/sources (or elsewhere with $GOPATH set) and copies in the specific files for this revision. Thus there will be no git/mercurial repository data within the vendor tree.

$ dep ensure
$ make || go build

Another dependency version manager

I'm happy to supply dependency versioning lock-files for more tools, as long as they don't conflict with any other tool, and they don't pull code maintained by others into this repository.

I don't want code of multiple copyrights and licenses in one git repository. I don't want someone else's misbehaviour coming to light to force me to rewrite my git history to remove copyright violating code: that's worse for provenance than having to hunt around for another clone of a dependency which does at least match the available checksums.

Table packages

Rendering content to tables requires a table package. We default to my own package, go.pennock.tech/tabular. We originally used github.com/apcera/termtables and briefly tried github.com/olekukonko/tablewriter before switching to writing my own.

You can use Go build tags to switch the table package used. I might remove support for this in the future.

Optional Tools

If you're just installing, you don't need these. If you're developing, you might.

• go get -v github.com/kisielk/godepgraph
  Dependency graphing tool
• go get -v github.com/golang/lint/golint
  Linter for Go