Show HN: Unicode Lookup – A fast, simple, and quick Unicode lookup tool
unicode.emnudge.dev
unicode.emnudge.dev
I've only recently dug into the big world of Unicode, but when doing so, I found the tools available sorely lacking. Most were server-side or needed to be downloaded and had confusing interfaces and buggy behavior.
The solution was to build my own. Turns out it's super easy to just download a 1.9MB text file and parse it using JavaScript. The entire application is client-side, so requests are quick and technically work offline.
Right click a symbol to copy it. Left click to open more information about it. Simple Search is the default. Click the button in the upper right to do some more sophisticated filtering with "Advanced Search".
I'll probably make it a PWA once I figure out how to properly do cache busting.
On a different note, I don't know many people who are interested in Unicode lookup tools and/or those who use such tools regularly. I've added in features that I personally found useful, but do let me know if there are killer features you'd like for it to have.
I haven't looked at the code, but I'm guessing it indexes all the Unicode names of characters, and allows lookup by any substrings of those names, right? Maybe using a suffix array. But it would be nice if there were wildcards. Regular expressions would IMO be overkill, but s.t. like Unix globs might be nice, e.g. "a * acute" to find "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE" or "LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE.
I detail this a bit more in the readme, but it supports general JS notation for certain things.
Surround your search with /these/ to perform a regex match on the character. To match on the name instead you can use the advanced search tab which is accessed via the button on the top left.
I may also add glob notation though, since that sounds like a pretty valid use case.