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Unicode Search

The "Unicode Search" dialog is accessible via the "..." button from:

The dialog provides a means to quickly locate a character by its descriptive Unicode name.

When the dialog is launched, the search edit box is pre-filled with the current character's name, providing a handy starting point for extending the search to similar characters. As the search box is edited, the result list is automatically refreshed to show all matching characters.

To select the desired character, simply double-click on it in the result list. If the desired character is already selected, you can also click the OK button, or press the Enter key.

Tip: you don't have to leave the search edit box to navigate the result list - keyboard navigation (arrow up/down, Page Up/Down etc) works even when the focus is on the search box.

Tip: result list can be sorted by clicking on the desired column header; note that, regardless of the sort order, characters belonging to the current Unicode subrange are always shown first. They are also have brighter background.

Tip: in addition to the Unicode character name, the search string also matches the character itself, as well as its hexadecimal code.
Eg character 'Њ' 040A 'Cyrillic Capital Letter Nje' can be located by searching for 'Њ' or '040A'.

Wildcard characters * and ?

The search box recognises special wildcard characters * (asterisk) and ? (question mark), with the usual semantics:

  • * matches any sequence of characters, including an empty sequence
  • ? matches any single character.

The wildcards are quite powerful, as they enable a rapid lookup and grouping of characters that have a certain common characteristic, but are otherwise scattered across numerous, often unrelated Unicode sub-ranges.

This is especially useful when defining dead tables of diacritic characters - for example, search string Latin * Letter * With Acute locates all Latin letters (both lower- and uppercase) that have the Acute accent. The Unicode standard version 10 defines 38 such letters, distributed across 4 subsets (1E00-1EFF Latin Extended Additional, 0080-00FF Latin-1 Supplement, 0100-017F Latin Extended-A and 0180-024F Latin Extended-B):

Limiting the result set size

To avoid performance degradation on too vague search terms, by default the result list is limited to max 1000 matches. You can change this limit through the Show max matching characters combo/edit box:

Be careful when choosing Unlimited - an excessive number of search matches can cause long delays in populating the result list, especially if it is sorted on the character name.

The result set can be further limited by unchecking the Include inactive subsets checkbox, which excludes characters that don't belong to the current Unicode subrange.

Search history

The search edit box maintains a history of recently used search terms, which can be recalled through its drop-down list:

Copying a character from the result list

Characters from the result list can be copied directly to the clipboard by choosing Copy from the right-click popup menu. Standard Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut is also supported:

Note that the popup also contains options to copy the character's hexadecimal code, name, and the Unicode subset it is part of.

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