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.

This is a fork of unidecode crate. This fork uses a compact representation of Unicode data to minimize memory overhead and executable size (about 70K codepoints mapped to 240K ASCII characters, using 450KB or memory, 160KB gzipped).

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 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 (0x00 - 0x7F) is mapped to itself.
• All Unicode characters will translate to printable ASCII characters (\n or characters in the range 0x20 - 0x7E).

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

• 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 "[?]" (or a custom placeholder, or None if you use a chars iterator).
• Many Unicode characters transliterate to multi-character strings. For example, "北" is transliterated as "Bei".
• Transliteration is context-free and not sophisticated enough to produce proper Chinese or Japanese. Han characters used in multiple languages are mapped to a single Mandarin pronounciation, and will be mostly illegible to Japanese readers. Transliteration can't handle cases where a single character has multiple possible pronounciations.

Unicode data

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

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