Motivation
Often when writing, I need to insert the degrees sign – for instance 25.3°C. Since it is not on my keyboard, I used to look it up on wikipedia.
Later I found some elisp code for dumping an ASCII table, but I still used valuable seconds looking for the sign. This made me discover the get-char-code-property function which adds a description. Now I could just do an I-search for “deg” and I would get to my invaluable degree-sign character.
But now I wanted the whole thing: the entire unicode table…
To the Point
;; show Unicode table
;; inspired by http://www.chrislott.org/geek/emacs/dotemacs.html
(defun unicode-table ()
"Print the utf16 table. Based on a defun by Alex Schroeder <asc@bsiag.com>"
(interactive)
(switch-to-buffer "*Unicode Table*")
(erase-buffer)
(insert (format "Unicode characters:\n"))
;; Generate list of all unicode code points
;; See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_plane#Overview
(setq code-points (append (number-sequence ?\x0000 ?\xffff)
(number-sequence ?\x10000 ?\x1ffff)
(number-sequence ?\x20000 ?\x2ffff)
(number-sequence ?\xe0000 ?\xeffff)))
;; Iterate code points
(dolist (code-point code-points)
;; Get description from emacs internals
(let ((description (get-char-code-property code-point
'name)))
;; Insert code-point, character and description
(insert (format "%4d 0x%02X %c %s\n"
code-point
code-point
code-point
description))))
;; Jump to beginning of buffer
(beginning-of-buffer))
;; inspired by http://www.chrislott.org/geek/emacs/dotemacs.html
(defun unicode-table ()
"Print the utf16 table. Based on a defun by Alex Schroeder <asc@bsiag.com>"
(interactive)
(switch-to-buffer "*Unicode Table*")
(erase-buffer)
(insert (format "Unicode characters:\n"))
;; Generate list of all unicode code points
;; See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_plane#Overview
(setq code-points (append (number-sequence ?\x0000 ?\xffff)
(number-sequence ?\x10000 ?\x1ffff)
(number-sequence ?\x20000 ?\x2ffff)
(number-sequence ?\xe0000 ?\xeffff)))
;; Iterate code points
(dolist (code-point code-points)
;; Get description from emacs internals
(let ((description (get-char-code-property code-point
'name)))
;; Insert code-point, character and description
(insert (format "%4d 0x%02X %c %s\n"
code-point
code-point
code-point
description))))
;; Jump to beginning of buffer
(beginning-of-buffer))
Calling this function with M-x unicode-table reveals
Unicode characters: 0 0x00 ^@ <control> 1 0x01 <control> 2 0x02 <control> 3 0x03 <control> 4 0x04 <control> 5 0x05 <control> 6 0x06 <control> 7 0x07 <control> 8 0x08 <control> 9 0x09 <control> 10 0x0A <control> 11 0x0B <control> 12 0x0C <control>
…
I hope that this is useful. If you like it, feel free to leave a comment.
