Detecting unicode private use area characters with python

Question

What is the proper way to identify unicode private use characters in python 3? There's nothing obviously relevant in the module unicodedata, which which makes it easy to look up character names and attributes.

Some background: unicodedata.name(), which gives the name of unicode characters, will raise a ValueError if called with a private use character (e.g., try unicodedata.name("\uf026")). But whitespace characters (except for space itself), and possibly other things, also trigger an exception. So what's a non-hacky, reliable way to detect PUA characters?

Answer 1

Private use characters are all in the Co general category, as returned by category() in unicodedata:

>>> import unicodedata
>>> def is_pua(c):
...   return unicodedata.category(c) == 'Co'
...
>>> is_pua(u'\uF026')
True

Given that the Unicode Standard guarantees that the set of private use characters will never change (no characters will ever be added or removed), it's also safe to hard-code the three ranges:

• U+E000 to U+F8FF
• U+F0000 to U+FFFFD
• U+100000 to U+10FFFD