How can I find the common name for a particular glyph?

Question

Sometimes, I'd like to know the name of a glyph. For example, if I see −, I may want to know if it's a hyphen -, an en-dash –, an em-dash —, or a minus symbol −. Is there a way that I can copy-paste this into a terminal to see what it is?

I am unsure if my system knows the common names to these glyphs, but there is certainly some (partial) information available, such as in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose. For example,

<Multi_key> <exclam> <question>         : "‽"   U203D # INTERROBANG

Another example glyph: .

Answer 1

Try the unicode utility:

$ unicode ‽
U+203D INTERROBANG
UTF-8: e2 80 bd  UTF-16BE: 203d  Decimal: ‽
‽
Category: Po (Punctuation, Other)
Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)

Or the uconv utility from the ICU package:

$ printf %s ‽ | uconv -x any-name
\N{INTERROBANG}

You can also get information via the recode utility:

$ printf %s ‽ | recode ..dump
UCS2   Mne   Description

203D         point exclarrogatif

Or with Perl:

$ printf %s ‽ | perl -CLS -Mcharnames=:full -lne 'print charnames::viacode(ord) for /./g'
INTERROBANG

Note that those give information on the characters that make-up that glyph, not on the glyph as a whole. For instance, for é (e with combining acute accent):

$ printf é | uconv -x any-name
\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E}\N{COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT}

Different from the standalone é character:

$ printf é | uconv -x any-name
\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE}

You can ask uconv to recombine those (for those that have a combined form):

$ printf 'e\u0301b\u0301' | uconv -x '::nfc;::name;'
\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER B}\N{COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT}

(é has a combined form, but not b́).

Answer 2

You can use Perl viacode function from charnames module:

$ printf ‽ | perl -Mcharnames=:full -CLS -nle 'print charnames::viacode(ord)'
INTERROBANG
$ printf  | perl -Mcharnames=:full -CLS -nle 'print charnames::viacode(ord)'
COW

charnames was first released with perl v5.6.0

---

With Perl 6 will be production ready on this Christmas day, it's worth to mention it here, since when it has the best support for Unicode characters I have ever seen. You only need to call uniname method/routine:

$ printf ‽ | perl6 -ne 'say .uniname'
INTERROBANG

é (e with combining acute accent) and standalone é character both give you:

# e with combining acute accent
$ printf é | perl6 -ne 'say .uniname'
LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE

# standalone é
$ printf é | perl6 -ne 'say .uniname'
LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE

(.uniname is the shorthand for $_.uniname)

Answer 3

The best way I know is through Perl's uniprops. It comes with Perl's Unicode::Tussle module. You can install it with

sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Unicode::Tussle'

You can then run it on any glyph you want to test:

$ uniprops  ‽
U+203D ‹‽› \N{INTERROBANG}
    \pP \p{Po}
    All Any Assigned InPunctuation Punct Is_Punctuation Common Zyyy Po P
       General_Punctuation Gr_Base Grapheme_Base Graph GrBase Other_Punctuation
       Pat_Syn Pattern_Syntax PatSyn Print Punctuation STerm Term
       Terminal_Punctuation Unicode X_POSIX_Graph X_POSIX_Print X_POSIX_Punct

$ uniprops  
U+1F404 ‹› \N{COW}
    \pS \p{So}
    All Any Assigned InMiscPictographs Common Zyyy So S Gr_Base Grapheme_Base Graph
       GrBase Misc_Pictographs Miscellaneous_Symbols_And_Pictographs Other_Symbol
       Print Symbol Unicode X_POSIX_Graph X_POSIX_Print

Answer 4

You can use unicode, which also outputs some more information than just the name:

# unicode –
U+2013 EN DASH
UTF-8: e2 80 93  UTF-16BE: 2013  Decimal: –
–
Category: Pd (Punctuation, Dash)
Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)

Answer 5

Create a bash script with this:

#!/bin/bash
awk -F ":" '{print $2}' /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose | grep "$1" | awk -F "#" '{print $2}'

Name it as you want, for example, namechar and give it executing permissions.

Now, you can call for example:

./namechar @

and the result will be:

COMMERCIAL AT