Where can I get a list of Unicode chars by class?

Question

I'm new to learning Unicode, and not sure how much I have to learn based on my ASCII background, but I'm reading the C# spec on rules for identifiers to determine what chars are permitted within Azure Table (which is directly based on the C# spec).

Where can I find a list of Unicode characters that fall into these categories:

• letter-character: A Unicode character of classes Lu, Ll, Lt, Lm, Lo, or Nl
• combining-character: A Unicode character of classes Mn or Mc
• decimal-digit-character: A Unicode character of the class Nd
• connecting-character: A Unicode character of the class Pc
• formatting-character: A Unicode character of the class Cf

Answer 1

FileFormat.info has a list of Unicode characters by category:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/category/index.htm

Answer 2

You can, of course, use LINQ:

var charInfo = Enumerable.Range(0, 0x110000)
                         .Where(x => x < 0x00d800 || x > 0x00dfff)
                         .Select(char.ConvertFromUtf32)
                         .GroupBy(s => char.GetUnicodeCategory(s, 0))
                         .ToDictionary(g => g.Key);

foreach (var ch in charInfo[UnicodeCategory.LowercaseLetter])
{
    Console.Write(ch);
}

You can find a list of Unicode categories and their short names on MSDN, e.g., "Ll" is short for UnicodeCategory.LowercaseLetter.

Answer 3

You can retrieve this information in an automated fashion from the official Unicode data file, UnicodeData.txt, which is published here:

• UnicodeData.txt (at unicode.org)

This is a file with semicolon-separated values in each line. The third column tells you the character class of each character.

The benefit of this is that you can get the character name for each character, so you have a better idea of what it is than by just looking at the character itself (e.g. would you know what ბ is? That’s right, it’s Ban. In Georgian. :-))