Mango0x45/librune

Easy unicode in a post-ASCII world

librune — easy Unicode in a post-ASCII world

Librune is a C library that aims to make interacting with Unicode and UTF-8 easy in C. There are no plans at the moment to support UTF-16 or -32, but they may be supported if such a usecase ever comes up.

This library requires C23.

Terminology

This library uses the term ‘rune’ to refer to a single Unicode-codepoint, and defines a rune datatype which is an unsigned integer type which represents a rune (shocker).

Headers

This library contains the following headers:

• builder.h — string building functions
• gbrk.h — grapheme-iteration functions
• mbstring.h — multibyte-string encoding, decoding, iteration, etc.
• rtype.h — rune categorization à la ctype.h
• rune.h — rune-constants, -macros, and -functions

Compilation

This library comes with a build script in the form of make.c. To build the library all you need is a C compiler. The build script will build a static library called ‘librune.a’.

# Make sure to link with pthread
cc -lpthread -o make make.c
./make

If you want to build the library in release-mode (optimizations enabled), simply pass the -r flag to the build script:

./make -r

You can also pass the -l flag to enable link-time optimizations:

./make -lr

Installation

There is no ‘intended’ way in which this library should be installed, used, and distributed. This library is primarily written for myself, and I prefer to vendor it in my projects. You may choose to install it as a shared and/or static library. You’re an engineer aren’t you? Figure it out.