I noticed that the excellent perl utility unum http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/unum/ uses an obsolete unicode database.
Since I’m a Pythonista, i recalled hearing about the stdlib unicodedata module, using which I either wanted to rewrite unum or extend its database.
Unfortunately, unicodedata is very limited. Partly rightfully so, since you can convert codepoints and chars with chr() and ord(), and str.upper() and friends are unicode-aware.
But the name database is only queryable using full names! I want to do unicodedata.search('clock') and get a list of dozens of glyphs with names like CLOCKWISE RIGHTWARDS AND LEFTWARDS OPEN CIRCLE ARROWS and CLOCK FACE THREE-THIRTY.
Maybe this should spit out a list of (name, char) tuples? or a {name: char} dict?
What do you mean?