Rune finders

rf: utility for locating Unicode characters by name.

About this repo

This is a collection of simple implementations of rf in different languages, intended as examples for people studying the languages. The description in this README.md is a good starting point for a coding dojo to implement an rf clone using TDD in any language.

What rf does

Given one or more words, rf displays a list of all Unicode characters that have those words in their names. Only complete words should be matched, and the match is case-insenstive. For example:

$ ./rf cat eyes
U+1F638	😸	GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES
U+1F63B	😻	SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES
U+1F63D	😽	KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES
(3 found)

Where to get the data

The standard names of Unicode characters can be found in the UnicodeData.txt text file (about 34K lines, 1.8 Mb and growing).

Some programming languages provide standard packages with that information. For example, in Python, there is the unicodedata package, and Go has the semi-official runenames package.

Using the official UnicodeData.txt has two advantages. First, you get it directly from the Unicode Consortium, so it is usually more current than the data packaged in a library, including the newest characters and emojis. Second, it provides alternative names for some characters, which sometimes are better than the standard name. For example, the standard name for \ is "reverse solidus", but UnicodeData.txt also offers "backslash" as an alternative.