NAME

ascii, unicode − interpret ASCII, Unicode characters

SYNOPSIS

­ascii [ ­-8 ] [ -oxdbn ] [ ­-nct ] [ ­text ]

­unicode [ ­-nt ] hexmin-hexmax

­unicode [ ­-t ] ­hex [ ...  ]

­unicode [ ­-n ] ­characters

­look ­hex ­/lib/unicode

DESCRIPTION

­Ascii prints the ASCII values corresponding to characters and ­vice versa; under the ­-8 option, the ISO Latin-1 extensions (codes 0200-0377) are included.  The values are interpreted in a settable numeric base; ­-o specifies octal, ­-d decimal, ­-x hexadecimal (the default), and -bn base n.

With no arguments, ­ascii prints a table of the character set in the specified base.  Characters of ­text are converted to their ASCII values, one per line. If, however, the first ­text argument is a valid number in the specified base, conversion goes the opposite way.  Control characters are printed as two- or three-character mnemonics.  Other options are:

­-n Force numeric output. 

­-c Force character output. 

­-t Convert from numbers to running text; do not interpret control characters or insert newlines. 

­Unicode is similar; it converts between UTF and character values from the Unicode Standard (see utf(6)). If given a range of hexadecimal numbers, ­unicode prints a table of the specified Unicode characters — their values and UTF representations.  Otherwise it translates from UTF to numeric value or vice versa, depending on the appearance of the supplied text; the ­-n option forces numeric output to avoid ambiguity with numeric characters.  If converting to UTF , the characters are printed one per line unless the ­-t flag is set, in which case the output is a single string containing only the specified characters.  Unlike ascii, ­unicode treats no characters specially. 

The output of ­ascii and ­unicode may be unhelpful if the characters printed are not available in the current font. 

The file ­/lib/unicode contains a table of characters and descriptions, sorted in hexadecimal order, suitable for look(1) on the lower case ­hex values of characters. 

EXAMPLES

­ascii -d
Print the ASCII table base 10. 

­unicode p
Print the hex value of ‘p’.

­unicode 2200-22f1
Print a table of miscellaneous mathematical symbols.

­look 039 /lib/unicode
See the start of the Greek alphabet’s encoding in the Unicode Standard.

FILES

­/lib/unicode table of characters and descriptions. 

SOURCE

­/sys/src/cmd/ascii.c
­/sys/src/cmd/unicode.c

SEE ALSO

look(1), tcs(1), utf(6), font(6)

Plan 9  —  April 17, 2005