deunicode

Documentation

The deunicode library transliterates Unicode strings such as "Æneid" into pure ASCII ones such as "AEneid."

It started as a Rust port of Text::Unidecode Perl module, and was extended to support emoji.

Examples

extern crate deunicode;
use deunicode::deunicode;

assert_eq!(deunicode("Æneid"), "AEneid");
assert_eq!(deunicode("étude"), "etude");
assert_eq!(deunicode("北亰"), "Bei Jing");
assert_eq!(deunicode("ᔕᓇᓇ"), "shanana");
assert_eq!(deunicode("げんまい茶"), "genmaiCha");
assert_eq!(deunicode("🦄☣"), "unicorn face biohazard");

Guarantees and Warnings

Here are some guarantees you have when calling deunicode():

• The String returned will be valid ASCII; the decimal representation of every char in the string will be between 0 and 127, inclusive.
• Every ASCII character (0x0000 - 0x007F) is mapped to itself.
• All Unicode characters will translate to a string containing newlines ("\n") or ASCII characters in the range 0x0020 - 0x007E. So for example, no Unicode character will translate to \u{01}. The exception is if the ASCII character itself is passed in, in which case it will be mapped to itself. (So '\u{01}' will be mapped to "\u{01}".)

There are, however, some things you should keep in mind:

• As stated, some transliterations do produce \n characters.
• Some Unicode characters transliterate to an empty string, either on purpose or because deunicode does not know about the character.
• Some Unicode characters are unknown and transliterate to "[?]".
• Many Unicode characters transliterate to multi-character strings. For example, 北 is transliterated as "Bei".
• Han characters are mapped to Mandarin, and will be mostly illegible to Japanese readers.

Unicode data

• Text::Unidecode by Sean M. Burke
• Unicodey by Cal Henderson

For a detailed explanation on the rationale behind the original dataset, refer to this article written by Burke in 2001.