Searching for Unicode code points by name

Question

I need a way to search for Unicode code points by the name of the code point in Swift/Objective-C on iOS. So if a user types "shade" it would find code points containing the word shade, like U+2591 through U+2593. What would be the most efficient way to do this?

Here is a public index for codepoint names: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25346064/2057171 — Albert Renshaw, Mar 17 '16 at 14:55
For anyone who cares, I ended up finding this link http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt which I used to create a database of all the value, and I can search for values in it pretty quickly — Addison, Mar 20 '16 at 02:34
The fact that this question was closed as "opinion based" is very odd... Voting for reopen. — Albert Renshaw, Mar 20 '16 at 02:45

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 17 '16 at 14:52

1

You'd need to keep a database of the unicode codepoint information, indexed by name.

You're never going to make this massively efficient, because you're doing a "contains" search. You can't use computer-science tricks like binary search or trees to do this. Ultimately, all the names have to be walked through.

answered Mar 17 '16 at 14:52

matt

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SQLite would be a very good format for this. – matt Mar 17 '16 at 14:53
Here is a public index for codepoint names: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25346064/2057171 – Albert Renshaw Mar 17 '16 at 14:55
Do you know where I could get a database with all this info already in it? Or even a json file so I could use that to make an sqlite database? – Addison Mar 17 '16 at 23:29
The info is readily downloaded from the unicode consortium. – matt Mar 18 '16 at 00:30

Searching for Unicode code points by name

1 Answers1