Detect whether unicode string is Japanese

[Bob Marley]

How can I get a tally of how many characters in a Unicode string are
Japanese (hiragana, katakana, kanji)? When I unpack a string, each
character comes out like \xE3\x81\x95, but I am trying to check if it's
in the range 3040-309F (Hiragana) and I don't understand how to convert
between the 3-byte representation and that range...

 

[Jan Dvorak]

How can I get a tally of how many characters in a Unicode string are
Japanese (hiragana, katakana, kanji)? When I unpack a string, each
character comes out like \xE3\x81\x95, but I am trying to check if it's
in the range 3040-309F (Hiragana) and I don't understand how to convert
between the 3-byte representation and that range...

You may lookup the unicode mapping on google, but you will have to write new
function for each possible encoding (UTF-8,UTF16LE...).

Or, with ruby 1.9, you can iterate string by characters (not bytes), and
use .ord function to get the unicode position number:

mystr.each_char do |ch|
puts ch.ord
end

Jan