| libgrapheme |
| =========== |
| |
| The libgrapheme library provides functions to properly handle Unicode |
| strings according to the Unicode specification. Unicode strings are made |
| up of user-perceived characters (so-called "grapheme clusters") that are |
| made up of one or more Unicode codepoints, which in turn are encoded in |
| one or more bytes in an encoding like UTF-8. |
| |
| There is a widespread misconception that it was enough to simply |
| determine codepoints in a string and treat them as user-perceived |
| characters to be Unicode compliant. While this may work in some cases, |
| this assumption quickly breaks, especially for non-Western languages and |
| decomposed Unicode strings where user-perceived characters are usually |
| represented using multiple codepoints. |
| |
| Despite the complicated multilevel structure of Unicode strings, |
| libgrapheme provides methods to work with them at the byte-level (i.e. |
| UTF-8 ‘char’ arrays) while also providing codepoint-level methods. |
| |
| See libgrapheme(7) to get started and try out the self-contained examples |
| given on the manual pages for each function. |
| |
| Requirements |
| ------------ |
| A C99-compiler and POSIX make. |
| |
| Installation |
| ------------ |
| Edit config.mk to match your local setup (usually not necessary, the |
| default prefix is /usr/local). |
| |
| Afterwards enter the following command to build and install libgrapheme |
| (if necessary as root): |
| |
| make install |
| |
| Conformance |
| ----------- |
| The libgrapheme library is compliant with the Unicode 14.0.0 |
| specification (September 2021). |
| |
| To ensure conformance, libgrapheme includes hundreds of tests including |
| all provided with the standard-provided test-data that is parsed |
| automatically. The tests can be run with |
| |
| make test |
| |
| to check standard conformance. |
| |
| Usage |
| ----- |
| Include the header grapheme.h in your code and link against libgrapheme |
| with "-lgrapheme" either statically ("-static") or dynamically. |
| |
| Author |
| ------ |
| Laslo Hunhold <dev@frign.de> |
