cjk-unihan

Simple interface to Unihan database for Node.js. Created for use on HanziPal & available on NPM

This library comes with:

• The simple to use node.js module for query Unihan data
• An SQLite3 database populated with data from the Unihan database
• Perl/bash scripts to generate said database, should you wish to update it, etc

Usage

var cjk_unihan = require("cjk-unihan");

// Query a single field for a specified character
cjk_unihan.get("我", "kTotalStrokes", function(err, result){
  console.log("Single field lookup all done:", result);
  // Single field lookup all done: 7
});

// Get all available information about a character
cjk_unihan.get("我", function(err, result){
  console.log("Full lookup all done:", result);
  // Full lookup all done: { character: '我',
  //   SUnicode: '62.3',
  //   kIRGKangXi: '0412.010',
  //   ...
  //   ...
  // }
});

Generating a fresh SQLite3 database

cd parser

# parser/data should contain a file which contains all the concatenated files downloaded from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/
# This file should be sorted by the first column, otherwise shit will break.

perl parse.pl < data/Unihan.sorted.txt > unihan.parsed

# Then we run the shell script to recreate the database file
create_db.sh

After this we should be set to go. Ideally I will wrap this all up in some simple package that will download the latest copy from the web and automate all this fiddling around

TODO

• Tidy up database generation scripts
• Automate download, concatenation, sorting of downloaded unihan txt files
• Tests would be nice. Real ones and such
• Tidy up the format of some data stored (Should currently be a 1:1 dump of the Unihan data)
  • ie, kHanyuPinyin should probably return an array of monosyllabic pronunciations, the rest of this field can be ignored when inserting to database
  • etc etc

Danger, Will Robinson!

It's very early days here. I'm sure there was another module that I used to use for this purpose, but I can't find it for the life of me so here this is. I expect the API calls to remain much the same as I work on this - it's a simple wrapper around a database to 'get' certain information, and doesn't need to do anything more.

The data returned however will be tidied up, change, prodded, poked, tweaked and modified until I am happier with it. If this happens I will increment version numbers accordingly, but I thought I'd add the Buyer Beware sticker before putting this out in the world.