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Comment by gibspaulding | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a struggle I've run into lately. Can anyone recommend a convenient way to identify an individual Unicode character or string of characters?

Ideally I'd like to be able to e.g. highlight one of these weird ligatures, or a whitespace that I want to identify, or an emoji my font doesn't support and select something like "identity this character" from the context menu to see what symbol or series of symbols I'm actually looking at.

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A context menu operation will be platform-specific, and I don't think you mentioned your platform(s). On MacOS, I used to use https://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/ (which also does HTML entities).

If you're OK with a command line tool, I just finished updating and finally publishing a Python script I wrote for that purpose around 15 years ago: https://pypi.org/project/unicode-name-inquiry/ Lots of options, but default usage is, for example:

    $ uni ≥
    ≥ U+2265 GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO

(It doesn't currently do the string-of-symbols case, because it tries to interpret strings as some other character identifier, e.g. `uni tilde` or `uni 8805`, but that sounds like a reasonable option to add.)

Typically, people just search for the character on the web and land on one of the many ‘monetized code charts’.

Unfortunately where this typically comes up is at work where I'm stuck on Windows, but I'll check out your python script!

I've been teaching myself python on the side in order to automate parts of my job so it would be neat to see it used here.

Open in Emacs, hit `control+h` then `c` with your cursor on the character, it'll show everything you want and more: https://i.imgur.com/X8xp1WS.gif (also shows the decomposition of composed characters so you can discern ä vs ä and emoji combinations)

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