Programmes

I've put together some small libraries and scripts, mainly for (Latin) character manipulation, which I couldn't find when I needed them.

• A Perl Library to convert TeX accents and special letters to UTF-8, including an example script for BibTeX files

  I alway wondered how to get the TeX accents used in computer Iron Age to a more modern encoding. The system is the same as in Unicode, (La)TeX \'a corresponding to Unicode a followed by the diacritic called COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. The library contains a function uncombine that translates TeX accents to unicode and by default returns the string in NFKC, i.e. using precombined characters as much as possible.

• A Python library and script converting non-ASCII to ASCII using German or Scandinavian conventions ("ö" to "oe" etc), dropping all remaining diacritics.

  I looked for something like this but couldn't find it. If this programme has become redundant (or, if it's helpful), please let me know.

• A Ruby library for treating CSV data like arrays. Documentation in the library file.

  Don't use this with big data files, but for small data files for use with R, I found it practical (but less so since my R has improved).

• Two Python Scripts to convert between (named and character) HTML entities and (normalised) Unicode.

  Very simple, but I was looking for something like that and couldn't find it. Practical if you (a) have to publish to a web server that doesn't use Unicode as default and you want to be able to read/edit the HTML you publish (I get lost in character entity references) or (b) move away from such a server…

Use this software as you want, as long as you don't make money from it and don't forget to mention me nicely. If that ‘licence’ is not enough, contact me.