Find out the unicode script of a character

Question

Given a unicode character what would be the simplest way to return its script (as \"Latin\", \"Hangul\" etc)? unicodedata doesn\'t seem to provide this kind of feature.

Answer 1

Oftentimes it is just enough to detect if a certain script is used, and then you can use the unicodedata.name with prefix matching. For example to find out whether a letter is Cyrillic, you can use

class CharacterNamePrefixTester(dict):
    def __init__(self, prefix):
        self.prefix = prefix
    def __missing__(self, key):
        self[key] = unicodedata.name(key, '').startswith(self.prefix)
        return self[key]

>>> cyrillic = CharaterNamePrefixTester('CYRILLIC ')
>>> cyrillic['й']
True
>>> cyrillic['a']
False

The dictionary is built lazily but the truth values are memoized so that future lookups of the same letter will be faster.