Unicode Character Names/Descriptions

[Pablo Canary]

If you run the Win2000 (Unicode) Character Map utility, whenever you
highlight a character, a description of it appears in the Status Line.
For example, highlighting 'Â' gives you 'Latin Capital Letter A With
Circumflex' or highlighting a certain Arabic letter (which I will not
attempt to show on Usenet!) gives you 'Arabic Letter Waw With Hamza
Above'.

I am writing an application which needs to do much the same thing.
My question is: Are these descriptions available via the the Win32
API? Or has someone laboriously programmed them into the App.

TIA

Pablo Canary

[Michael (michka) Kaplan]

The information is not available by API. You can do the same thing MS did
here -- parsing the data from nameslist.txt in the Unicode Character
Database (UCD).

See the following URL for more information (all on one line!):

http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeCharacterDatabase.html

--
MichKa

Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc. -- http://www.trigeminal.com/

International VB? -- http://www.i18nWithVB.com/
C++? MSLU -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/

"Pablo Canary" <pablo_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:5060e0ba.02011...@posting.google.com...

[Pablo Canary]

Thanks for that. I have discovered that MS distill this data into a
DLL called GetUName.dll, which I can use when I work out the interface
to it.

"Michael \(michka\) Kaplan" <forme...@nospam.trigeminal.spamless.com> wrote in message news:<ODVecQBoBHA.2416@tkmsftngp02>...

[Michael (michka) Kaplan]

On the whole, it would be better for you to parse and provide yourself (as
below) since that way you can (a) get more names since the MS list is
incomplete ;b) avoid having to reverse engineer the call; (c) work on other
platforms other than Win2000/XP; (d) easily plug in updates as there are
updates to Unicode.

--
MichKa

Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc. -- http://www.trigeminal.com/

International VB? -- http://www.i18nWithVB.com/
C++? MSLU -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/

"Pablo Canary" <pablo_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message

news:5060e0ba.02012...@posting.google.com...

[Pablo Canary]

I see what you mean, but I had assumed that using the MS DLL would
provide me with something else. I had assumed that on non-English
versions of Windows, GetUName.dll would return the name of the
character _in the local language_.
If I were to parse nameslist.txt I would need to do this translation.
And you can bet that the Arabic for 'Arabic Letter Waw With Hamza
Above' cannot be translated by a simple word-for word substitution!
Unfortunately, I do not have any non-English version of Win2000 to
hand to test my theory....

Paulus

"Michael \(michka\) Kaplan" <forme...@nospam.trigeminal.spamless.com> wrote in message news:<Oe27Z6noBHA.1004@tkmsftngp07>...

[Michael (michka) Kaplan]

Well:

1) It almost never does this (I think it might for French? Maybe German).

2) It never should do this -- the character names are a normative part of
the standard AS THEY ARE.

[Pablo Canary]

"Michael \(michka\) Kaplan" <forme...@nospam.trigeminal.spamless.com> wrote in message news:<OMnwAI3oBHA.2464@tkmsftngp03>...

> Well:
>
> 1) It almost never does this (I think it might for French? Maybe German).

I was afraid that might be the case :o( .

>
> 2) It never should do this -- the character names are a normative part of
> the standard AS THEY ARE.

Yes, but the non-English-speaking end-user does not particularly care
what names are used in the Unicode standard. They may likely never
have heard of Unicode! What they care about is, for example, not using
a Latin 'Y' where they intended to use a Greek 'Upsilon'.

Anyway, thanks for your help. I can see I am going to have to come at
this problem another way.