The inspiration for this question comes from this SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/11125
I want to write a script to convert standard looking characters (e.g. letters in the English alphabet), to UTF-8 characters that are unusual and makes me appear crazy.
Did kiamlaluno sift through the thousands of UTF-8 characters to find similar looking characters to English letters, or is there possibly a more automated way to do this?
I would like the answer in Python, but any programming language will probably give me a suitable solution.
For example, convert:
PONY
to
P̯͍̭O̚N̐Y̡
A decent excerpt from the SO answer:
.
co*̶͑̾̾̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅sZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱ TO͇̹̺ͅƝ̴ȳ̳ TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ?
There's a python module called pyzalgo.
>>> import zalgo
>>> print zalgo.zalgo('hello')
Ḩ̝̳͓̪̲͌̌͗̔́͌̄͢͢͢͢͢͢E̶̢̯̭̟̥̖̯̙̬ͪ̄̉ͭ͗̏́̈́L̢̢͓̺͇̠̠͉͙̪͍̽ͣͩ͂̾͒̊ͦL̵̶̶̢̬͈̬̦̜̥̲̜͓͎̝̣̙̞̝Ơ̷̸̴̷̘͙͕͈̞̜̠͙̰̬̰̣̟̭
It appears to be pretty straightforward and customisable after a quick look at the code.
Thanks for the info #hobbs.
Perhaps not "crazy looking", but something in the same vein:
https://github.com/reinderien/mimic
Related
I've done some research and can't find any way to transliterate Japanese.
Stringex would have been the best bet, but it's a known issue that it treats Japanese as Mandarin. I've verified this happens even when there are obvious Japanese characters present (ie kana). Same for Unidecoder.
I realise it's a hard problem as Kanji phonetics are ambiguous, but this is for URL slugs so it doesn't have to be perfect.
I've never tried it, but you could try this:
https://github.com/makimoto/romaji
"Romaji" is basically the name for system the Japanese themselves use to write in Roman/Latin characters. I am not certain if transliterations targetted at romaji for Japanese speakers will be what you need if you are targetting non-Japanese speakers, but it seems like it might be good.
So you could try romaji in your google searching, that's what I did. Since ruby, of course, originated in Japan, I figured there'd be something around for it.
(Using Ruby 1.8)
I only have a brief understanding of encoding and such...but what I want to know is, in any given script handling any given text-file, is there some universal library or call I need to make to turn non-standard characters into their nearest printable equivalent. I realize there's no "all-in-one" fix, but this is for a English (U.S. gov't) text file, and so I'm wondering if there's something that mitigates what must be a relatively common issue in English text formatting.
For example, in a text file, I have an entry like this:
0-823
That hyphen is just literally a hyphen as I've typed it out. In the file though, it's something that looks like a hyphen (an n-dash?) but when copy and pasting it...for example, into this browser text box, it doesn't show up.
Printing it out via a Ruby script gets this:
08�23
How do I get my script to resolve it into a dash. Or something other than a gremlin?
It's very common to run into hyphen-like characters and dashes, especially in the output of word-processors. Converting them isn't too hard if you know what the byte is that represents the character, but gets to be a pain when you get a document with several different ones. It gets worse as you throw other accented characters into the mix.
Ruby 1.8 doesn't support multibyte and Unicode character sets as well as 1.9+, but you can work around that somewhat by using the Iconv library.
Iconv lets you convert between various character-sets, such as US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 and WIN-1252. It's smarter than a regex, because it knows how to convert from accented characters, to similarly looking characters, or ignore them if nothing similar exists, allowing your transliteration to degrade gracefully.
I have some example code in an answer to a related question. Also read James Grey's article linked in the answer. It explains the problem and ways to fix it, ending up with recommending Iconv too.
You could whitelist with gsub:
string.gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/)
Without knowing more information, I can't build the perfect regex for you, but the general idea is to replace anything that's not what you're expecting (anything not a letter or number or expected symbols).
Normally I use Recaptcha for all captcha purposes, but now I'm building a website that is translated into Chinese and Japanese, among other languages. I'd like to make the captcha as accessible to those users as possible. Even if they can read and type English characters (which is not necessarily the case), often times even I as an English-speaker have had trouble figuring out what the word in Recaptcha has to be.
One good solution I've seen (from Google) is to use numbers instead of text. Are there other good solutions? Is there a reliable free captcha service out there such as Recaptcha that offers this option?
The Chinese and Japanese both use a keyboard with Latin characters on. The Chinese input their 1000s of characters via Pinyin (Romanized Chinese) and so they are very familiar with all the same letters that you and I are. Therefore, whatever you are using for English speaking people can also be used for them.
PS - I know this is an answer to an old post, but I'm hoping this answer will help anyone who comes here with the same question.
I have encountered the same problem in the past, I resolved the issue by using the following CAPTCHA which uses a numerical validation:
http://www.tipstricks.org/
However, this may not be the best solution for you, so here is an extensive list of different CAPTCHAs you might want to consider (most of them are text based, but some use alternative methods such as numerical expressions):
http://captcha.org/
Hope this helps
I am working on an application that allows users to input Japanese language characters. I am trying to come up with a way to determine whether the user's input is a Japanese kana (hiragana, katakana, or kanji).
There are certain fields in the application where entering Latin text would be inappropriate and I need a way to limit certain fields to kanji-only, or katakana-only, etc.
The project uses UTF-8 encoding. I don't expect to accept JIS or Shift-JIS input.
Ideas?
It sounds like you basically need to just check whether each Unicode character is within a particular range. The Unicode code charts should be a good starting point.
If you're using .NET, my MiscUtil library has some Unicode range support - it's primitive, but it should do the job. I don't have the source to hand right now, but will update this post with an example later if it would be helpful.
Not sure of a perfect answer, but there is a Unicode range for katakana and hiragana listed on Wikipedia. (Which I would expect are also available from unicode.org as well.)
Hiragana: Unicode: 3040-309F
Katakana: Unicode: 30A0–30FF
Checking those ranges against the input should work as a validation for hiragana or katakana for Unicode in a language-agnostic manner.
For kanji, I would expect it to be a little more complicated, as I
expect that the Chinese characters used in Chinese and Japanese are both included in the same range, but then again, I may be wrong here. (I can't expect that Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese to be included in the same range...)
oh oh! I had this one once... I had a regex with the hiragana, then katakana and then the kanji. I forget the exact codes, I'll go have a look.
regex is great because you double the problems. And I did it in PHP, my choice for extra strong auto problem generation
--edit--
$pattern = '/[^\wぁ-ゔァ-ヺー\x{4E00}-\x{9FAF}_\-]+/u';
I found this here, but it's not great... I'll keep looking
--edit--
I looked through my portable hard drive.... I thought I had kept that particular snippet from the last company... sorry.
My program has to read files that use various encodings. They may be ANSI, UTF-8 or UTF-16 (big or little endian).
When the BOM (Byte Order Mark) is there, I have no problem. I know if the file is UTF-8 or UTF-16 BE or LE.
I wanted to assume when there was no BOM that the file was ANSI. But I have found that the files I am dealing with often are missing their BOM. Therefore no BOM may mean that the file is ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-16 BE or LE.
When the file has no BOM, what would be the best way to scan some of the file and most accurately guess the type of encoding? I'd like to be right close to 100% of the time if the file is ANSI and in the high 90's if it is a UTF format.
I'm looking for a generic algorithmic way to determine this. But I actually use Delphi 2009 which knows Unicode and has a TEncoding class, so something specific to that would be a bonus.
Answer:
ShreevatsaR's answer led me to search on Google for "universal encoding detector delphi" which surprised me in having this post listed in #1 position after being alive for only about 45 minutes! That is fast googlebotting!! And also amazing that Stackoverflow gets into 1st place so quickly.
The 2nd entry in Google was a blog entry by Fred Eaker on Character encoding detection that listed algorithms in various languages.
I found the mention of Delphi on that page, and it led me straight to the Free OpenSource ChsDet Charset Detector at SourceForge written in Delphi and based on Mozilla's i18n component.
Fantastic! Thank you all those who answered (all +1), thank you ShreevatsaR, and thank you again Stackoverflow, for helping me find my answer in less than an hour!
Maybe you can shell out to a Python script that uses Chardet: Universal Encoding Detector. It is a reimplementation of the character encoding detection that used by Firefox, and is used by many different applications. Useful links: Mozilla's code, research paper it was based on (ironically, my Firefox fails to correctly detect the encoding of that page), short explanation, detailed explanation.
Here is how notepad does that
There is also the python Universal Encoding Detector which you can check.
My guess is:
First, check if the file has byte values less than 32 (except for tab/newlines). If it does, it can't be ANSI or UTF-8. Thus - UTF-16. Just have to figure out the endianness. For this you should probably use some table of valid Unicode character codes. If you encounter invalid codes, try the other endianness if that fits. If either fit (or don't), check which one has larger percentage of alphanumeric codes. Also you might try searchung for line breaks and determine endianness from them. Other than that, I have no ideas how to check for endianness.
If the file contains no values less than 32 (apart from said whitespace), it's probably ANSI or UTF-8. Try parsing it as UTF-8 and see if you get any invalid Unicode characters. If you do, it's probably ANSI.
If you expect documents in non-English single-byte or multi-byte non-Unicode encodings, then you're out of luck. Best thing you can do is something like Internet Explorer which makes a histogram of character values and compares it to histograms of known languages. It works pretty often, but sometimes fails too. And you'll have to have a large library of letter histograms for every language.
ASCII? No modern OS uses ASCII any more. They all use 8 bit codes, at least, meaning it's either UTF-8, ISOLatinX, WinLatinX, MacRoman, Shift-JIS or whatever else is out there.
The only test I know of is to check for invalid UTF-8 chars. If you find any, then you know it can't be UTF-8. Same is probably possible for UTF-16. But when it's no Unicode set, then it'll be hard to tell which Windows code page it might be.
Most editors I know deal with this by letting the user choose a default from the list of all possible encodings.
There is code out there for checking validity of UTF chars.