Find out the unicode script of a character

Question

Given a unicode character what would be the simplest way to return its script (as "Latin", "Hangul" etc)? unicodedata doesn't seem to provide this kind of feature.

Answer 1

I was hoping someone's done it before, but apparently not, so here's what I've ended up with. The module below (I call it unicodedata2) extends unicodedata and provides script_cat(chr) which returns a tuple (Script name, Category) for a unicode char. Example:

# coding=utf8
import unicodedata2
print unicodedata2.script_cat(u'Ф')  #('Cyrillic', 'L')
print unicodedata2.script_cat(u'の')  #('Hiragana', 'Lo')
print unicodedata2.script_cat(u'★')  #('Common', 'So')

The module: https://gist.github.com/2204527

Answer 2

It seems to me that the Python unicodedata module contains tools for accessing the main file in the Unicode database but nothing for the other files: “The data in this database is based on the UnicodeData.txt file”

The script information is in the Scripts.txt file. It is of relatively simple format (described in UAX #44) and not horribly large (131 kilobytes), so you might consider parsing it in your program. Note that in the Unicode classification, there’s the “Common” script that contains characters used in different scripts, like punctuation marks.