Hi @cm0002! Out of curiosity, it has been stated by @lengau that you posted this here because Ubuntu’s switch to uutils has motivated you to pay more attention to other projects that the FSF is working on. Is this true, or was this just a projection?

(Just to be clear, I don’t mind if this is your motivation, since you supply so much of the content here so I am not going to complain, and it is fun to hear about projects I was unaware of anyway! I just don’t like seeing people project their own biases onto others.)

It’s weird when you post a link with no explanation whatsoever about what the software is:

Text files are nowadays usually encoded in Unicode, and may consist of very different scripts – from Latin letters to Chinese Hanzi –, with many kinds of special characters – accents, right-to-left writing marks, hyphens, Roman numbers, and much more. But the POSIX platform APIs for text do not contain adequate functions for dealing with particular properties of many Unicode characters. In fact, the POSIX APIs for text have several assumptions at their base which don’t hold for Unicode text. This library provides functions for manipulating Unicode strings and for manipulating C strings according to the Unicode standard.

Details

This library consists of the following parts: <unistr.h> elementary string functions <uniconv.h> conversion from/to legacy > encodings <unistdio.h> formatted output to > strings <uniname.h> character names <unictype.h> character classification and properties <uniwidth.h> string width when using nonproportional fonts <uniwbrk.h> word breaks <unilbrk.h> line breaking algorithm <uninorm.h> normalization (composition and decomposition) <unicase.h> case folding <uniregex.h> regular expressions (not yet implemented)

Who needs libunistring?

libunistring is for you if your application involves non-trivial text processing, such as upper/lower case conversions, line breaking, operations on words, or more advanced analysis of text. Text provided by the user can, in general, contain characters of all kinds of scripts. The text processing functions provided by this library handle all scripts and all languages.

libunistring is for you if your application already uses the ISO C / POSIX <ctype.h>, <wctype.h> functions and the text it operates on is provided by the user and can be in any language.

libunistring is also for you if your application uses Unicode strings as internal in-memory representation.