Recognizing a character to be Chinese and get Chinese "pinyin" phonetics from simplified characters?

Question

Is it possible to
A) find out if a character is Chinese (simplified)
and in that case
B) get the pinyin? example： 你好 => nǐhǎo
using java or php?

Cheers

Answer 1

A)
Yes. All characters represented in unicode have a unique numeric index called a codepoint.

If you know the range of codepoints for simplified Chinese and you know how to get the unicode codepoint of a given character, a simple comparison will tell you if the given character is within the simplified Chinese range.

An existing question has a solution for getting the unicode codepoint for a character in PHP:
How to get code point number for a given character in a utf-8 string?

In Java, the static java.lang.Character::codePointAt() method will give you what you need.

B)
Converting a simplified Chinese character, or string, to Pinyin would most likely require some form of map with the unicode code point as the key and the corresponding pinyin as the value.

An example of this in PHP is shown at http://kingphp.com/108.html.

A simple Google search for [java pinyin] reveals a range of options, two of which being Chinese to pinyin libraries at http://kiang.org/jordan/software/pinyinime/ and http://pinyin4j.sourceforge.net/.

Answer 2

If you are using utf-8 to interpret your files and calls to the DB, i guess a simple

$new_text = preg_replace(array('/你好/',...), array('nǐhǎo',...), $old_text);

should do the trick.

Where are you getting your string from?