Show HN: Mojibake – A low-level Unicode library written in C

57 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by program
(mojibake.zaerl.com)

15 Comments

throwaway2037

3 hours ago

I assume the submitter is also the author. If so, can you share about your motivation to write this library? For example, do you use it professionally or in hobby projects? Did you look at other libraries and think that you could do better? These are honest questions -- no trolling from me. I browsed the code and it looks very clean.

The API documention is so nice! It looks like index.html from https://mojibake.zaerl.com/ uses JavaScript to generate the page. Very cool, indeed.

program

3 hours ago

Yes, I'm the author. I began writing this library because I needed something to handle Unicode for another project of mine (that I didn't finish), and I didn't like ICU4C or the other libraries I found.

It's a hobby project I wrote because I find the Unicode standard (sometimes unnecessary) complexity fascinating. And for other people to use, if needed.

The HTML page is static and generated at compile time. Every function has a little form to test the WASM function.

lifthrasiir

8 hours ago

How does it compare with utf8proc [1]? I'm aware that Mojibake does a bit more than utf8proc (e.g. bi-di) but that seems marginal to me.

[1] https://juliastrings.github.io/utf8proc/

program

2 hours ago

Mojibake handle UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-32, UTF-32LE, UTF-32BE in input and output. Can be used as a simple file and handle a wider number of algorithms, such as the "confusable" one.

digg99

8 hours ago

Love the amalgamation approach—the C/C++ ecosystem desperately needs cleaner, lightweight Unicode support without pulling in massive dependencies... thanks for sharing

program

2 hours ago

Thank you very much. I've also started writing a smaller C++ wrapper so the user can use std::string_view for this, but I'm not the best C++ guy out there.

tjwebbnorfolk

8 hours ago

what's performance like compared to python ftfy module?

program

2 hours ago

Mojibake is a C library, not Python, so comparing the two isn't ideal. You can see the performance in the GitHub workflows results. At the end of the logs, there is an "execution time" line.

avadodin

8 hours ago

I have come to the conclusion that the only Unicode support needed in C is supporting pointers to char and arrays but lightweight C libraries are always welcome.

program

31 minutes ago

(Author here) Dealing with encodings is already a big step when you aim to handle multiple ones and multiple OSes. You can see what I am talking about in the tests/ folder.

With Mojibake, I wanted to help people handle text by providing the smallest possible C/C++ library, without requiring them to use a +20MB library just to normalize a string, handle a flag emoji, or perform similar tasks.

See the CONFORMANCE_REQUIREMENTS.md file if you are interested in what the +17 versions of the Unicode standard have introduced.

adrianN

7 hours ago

I guess you never have to deal with text if you think that’s enough? What kind of software do you write in C?

avadodin

an hour ago

Software that treats Unicode(UTF-8) text as a bag of bytes, obviously. Even better if it is in a fixed length box of bytes.

A cursory look at the services provided by this library should dissuade people from attempting to work with Unicode text in C.

You can of course use or build a text processing engine's DSL that does all sorts of things people may want to do with Unicode text but C is hardly the best fit.