Ubuntu Manpage: ascii, unicode - interpret ASCII, Unicode characters

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(7)).
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