UniSpy

A tiny utility for quickly browsing the latest version of the Unicode standard and the most important text encodings ("codepages"). It lives in the Windows tray and can be popped up whenever required.

UniSpy The utility consists of four main panes: Unicode, Favorites, Typewriter and Encodings.

Unicode Pane

This pane allows you to browse the selected Unicode ranges. As the Unicode standard counts more than 1 million characters it would be impractical to load all of them, also because typically users need only a subset of it. Thus, you can use the range button to select the ranges you want to view; you can either select by numeric range or by script. By default the selected ranges cover the most used Latin ranges, Greek and IPA.

Unicode pane

You can scroll the characters list and filter it by range, category, name, and other Unicode attributes (decomposable, mirrored, numeric: each of these filters has 3 states: inactive, enabled, disabled). Just select the desired value from the filter, or type some part of the Unicode name and press Enter, to find all the matching characters.

Each row in the list shows the hexadecimal and decimal codes of the character, its glyph, Unicode category and name. Data are directly drawn from the latest version of the Unicode standard.

You can use the buttons under the filters to (from left to right):

  • copy the selected character (so that you can paste it wherever you want);
  • save the current list to a file;
  • reset all the filters.

The count to the right of the buttons represents the number of items currently displayed. When you hover on a character row the top-right portion of the pane shows a bigger version of the character glyph, plus its name and decomposition details (if any).

If you double click a row the corresponding character will be added to the favorites and copied into the clipboard.

Favorites Pane

This pane contains an arbitrary list of favorite characters (the program already comes with my predefined list).

Favorites pane

You can build the list by double clicking any row in the Unicode pane. Use the toolbar buttons to:

  • move left or right the selected character;
  • delete the selected character;
  • delete all the characters;
  • export favorites to file;
  • load favorites from file.

Use the slider to zoom the favorites pane in or out (the 1:1 button resets zoom to 100%). Double click a character to copy it in the clipboard.

Typewriter Pane

Typewriter pane

In this pane you can type some text in the top box and have the corresponding Unicode character codes displayed in the bottom box. You can choose among different styles for representing codes (hexadecimal, decimal or C# code literal) in the top-left combobox. You can type right-to-left scripts by checking the left-arrow button, and get the detailed descriptions of each character typed by clicking the lens button.

Encodings Pane

This pane allows you to play with the most used text encodings. Select an encoding from the encoding list, and a numeric base from the base list. Then type something in the text box and click the Show bytes button to see its bytes in the selected encoding and base.

Encodings pane

Alternatively, type some bytes values in the bytes box (dividing each value with spaces and using the selected base) and click the Show text button to see the corresponding text.

You can find the same functionality online in this site here.

Highlights

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