L2/01-267R

Re: Property file changes for UCD 3.2.1
From: Mark Davis
Date: 2002-07-25

While doing some work for the IDN identifier tables, I came across a number of property issues; other ICU team members and users also ran across related property issues that are also included here. The list grew from there, as I collected other property-related issues that have come up, such as from the editorial committee.

The following are proposed for Unicode 3.2.1.

  1. Identifier_Revelations
  2. UTF-8 in Property Files
  3. Fallback_Properties
  4. Line_Break_TR
  5. SpecialCasing and TR21
  6. New_Properties in PropList.txt
  7. PropertyAliases_and_PropertyValueAliases

Identifier Revelations

A. Oversights. The following two are clear oversights in PropList.txt.

U+034F COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER should be in Other_Default_Ignorable_Code_Point.
U+205F MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE should be in White_Space

B. Invisibles. The following two characters should be discussed. Since the normal behavior of a program that does not support them would be to display them as invisible rather than a square box, they should in my opinion also be added to Other_Default_Ignorable_Code_Point.

U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN (SHY)
U+1806 MONGOLIAN TODO SOFT HYPHEN

The vast majority of the time, these characters are invisible. If they are scattered through the words in the text, then having them show up as black boxes would be very disconcerting. Far better for the default presentation when unsupported by a system to be invisible. We also need to clarify the description of Other_Default_Ignorable_Code_Point given in PropList.html to make this point clear (the invisibility of DICPs is in UTC documents, but doesn't show up in that file). What it says is: "characters that should be ignored in processing (unless explicitly supported)".

That is, these are characters that an application should ignore if it does not support the characters for the particular process in question (whether it be linebreak, identifiers, rendering, or whatever). We are not talking about characters that the program does support for the particular processing. If a program does support SHY in rendering, for example, it should render it as a hyphen if it has broken after it -- but otherwise ignore it in rendering, and not display it visibly

The idea is that if a program does not support, say, DEVANAGARI LETTER KA, it should still not ignore it in processing, especially in rendering. Displaying nothing would give the user the impression that it does not occur in the text at all. So we recommend displaying a box or a special last-resort glyph. If we were parsing for identifiers, we would not ignore an unsupported character (like KA); we would break an identifier before it -- and not include it in the identifier.

However, with characters like ZWJ, if the program does not support it, the best approach is to ignore it completely; don't display a box, since the normal display of the character is invisible -- it's effects are on other characters (which we can't show anyway since we don't support the character).

In the discussion with Deborah Goldsmith in the UTC meeting, it was also clarified that another way to characterize this property is the set of characters that are normally invisible. Now, of course, the SHY is an odd case -- what do we mean by normally invisible. My view is that they are typically invisible: only displayed visibly when a word is broken in the middle. In all other circumstances -- most of the time -- they are invisible. But it is definitely a gray area.

Ken had a good observation: Just defining a property by enumeration, and then having a two-liner patched into the documentation is evidently not enough. I think we are going to have to require some more explicit criteria put forward for new properties, so that a smart committee of people, conversant in character encoding, can reliably produce the same or similar results when asked to apply the property against some particular character, to make these kinds of determinations.

C. Letter Modifiers. The General Category Sk (Symbol, Modifier) contains characters that are essentially the same as Lm (Letter Modifiers) except that their form is unlike a letter. However, few people took this into consideration in practice, since they were in the symbols section. For example, these were inappropriately excluded from our word and titlecase definition and from our identifier syntax. We have added them back into our word and titlecase definition, but did not make the corresponding change to our identifier syntax.

Unfortunately, Sk also contains some oddities like spacing MACRON, which should not be parts of words or identifiers. Natural languages don't use ^ as part of a word (separately as in "ro^le" -- they do use "rôle")?  It is no more natural than "ro◇le", "ro⇕le", "ro░le" or "ro☺le". Nor so we recommend that "ro^le" even sort anything like "rôle".

I recommend that we make the following fixes:

1. Leave the following characters in Sk

005E ; Sk # CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
0060 ; Sk # GRAVE ACCENT
00A8 ; Sk # DIAERESIS
00AF ; Sk # MACRON
00B4 ; Sk # ACUTE ACCENT
00B8 ; Sk # CEDILLA
FF3E ; Sk # FULLWIDTH CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
FF40 ; Sk # FULLWIDTH GRAVE ACCENT
FFE3 ; Sk # FULLWIDTH MACRON
0374..0375 ; Sk # [2] GREEK NUMERAL SIGN..GREEK LOWER NUMERAL SIGN
0384..0385 ; Sk # [2] GREEK TONOS..GREEK DIALYTIKA TONOS
1FBD ; Sk # GREEK KORONIS
1FBF..1FC1 ; Sk # [3] GREEK PSILI..GREEK DIALYTIKA AND PERISPOMENI
1FCD..1FCF ; Sk # [3] GREEK PSILI AND VARIA..GREEK PSILI AND PERISPOMENI
1FDD..1FDF ; Sk # [3] GREEK DASIA AND VARIA..GREEK DASIA AND PERISPOMENI
1FED..1FEF ; Sk # [3] GREEK DIALYTIKA AND VARIA..GREEK VARIA
1FFD..1FFE ; Sk # [2] GREEK OXIA..GREEK DASIA
309B..309C ; Sk # [2] KATAKANA-HIRAGANA VOICED SOUND MARK..SEMI-VOICED SOUND MARK

The above are all special-case spacing symbols that are not used in the interior of words or identifiers in practice, any more that other symbols are. They should be left as Symbols to reflect this.

2. Move the following into Lm.

02B9..02BA ; Sk # [2] MODIFIER LETTER PRIME..MODIFIER LETTER DOUBLE PRIME
02C2..02CF ; Sk # [14] MODIFIER LETTER LEFT ARROWHEAD..MODIFIER LETTER LOW ACUTE ACCENT
02D2..02DF ; Sk # [14] MODIFIER LETTER CENTRED RIGHT HALF RING..MODIFIER LETTER CROSS ACCENT
02E5..02ED ; Sk # [9] MODIFIER LETTER EXTRA-HIGH TONE BAR..MODIFIER LETTER UNASPIRATED

These character are intermixed with letters as a part of words, and should be allowed in both of them; there is also no reason to exclude them from identifiers. Moving them into Lm would reflect that fact, and produce better default behavior for all processes dealing with words and identifiers.

3. Adjust the word/titlecase definitions to remove Sk.

The only reason for them to include Sk was for the characters in #2, but this also includes the unwanted characters from #1. Once the #2 characters are removed from Sk, then the word/titlecase definitions don't need them any more.

Alternatives.

  1. Leave Sk the way it is. A useless collection of characters. Add a new property that distinguishes the word-capable characters. Add it to the definitions of titlecase, words, identifiers*.
  2. Move goofy (a technical term) characters like (spacing) MACRON into So. Leave the definition of titlecase, word alone (they use Sk). Add Sk to the definition of identifier*.

D. Backwards-Compatible Identifiers. As it turns out, the Unicode definitions of identifiers have been, in general, backwards-compatible. That is, if X was an identifier under some version of Unicode, it is also an identifier under the current version of Unicode (with very few exceptions). We provide guidelines for how people can make their own identifiers backwards-compatible if the Unicode definitions change, but it would make it far simpler for implementers if we simply guaranteed that our identifiers were backwards-compatible. The earliest point at which commercial languages started using the Unicode definition was 2.0, so we should start there.

I thus recommend:

1. Adding the following exceptional set to each of the identifier properties:

U+2118 # SCRIPT CAPITAL P
U+212E # ESTIMATED SYMBOL
U+309B..U+309C # KATAKANA-HIRAGANA VOICED SOUND MARK..SEMI-VOICED SOUND MARK

2. Verifying with each release programmatically (with the same program that generated the above) that backwards-compatibility is maintained.

The only down-side that I can see with this is that we are slightly out of sync with the ISO TR 10176; but we are already out of sync since they are based on old versions of the Unicode standard (currently the one in ballot is based on 3.0, and is already 44K characters out of date!). This is a simple application of "practice what you preach", and makes it far easier for users of our standard to themselves have backwards-compatible identifiers.

One might think that extending the notion of identifier could cause problems. But these characters are not an issue. The
only possibility of a conflict would arise if you were parsing a file, and encountered something like:

...identifier<syntax character>...

which suddenly got treated as an identifier. However, none of the mentioned characters are treated as syntax characters in any known
programming language, so it would not be an issue.


UTF-8 in Property Files

I believe the time has come to use UTF-8 consistently in all of our property data files. Currently Unihan.txt and NormalizationTest.txt are in UTF-8, a couple files are in Latin- 1, and most files are in ASCII. However, importantly:

This means that parsers that strip comments don't even need to know that the file is UTF-8 (unless they parse Unihan.txt); they can just treat it as ASCII. If we continue to follow these two principles, it makes the switchover almost unnoticeable. Initially, this would only matter in the few files that contain some Latin-1 non ASCII. Later, we could add real, readable annotations in comments to some of the files, e.g.:

00DF; 00DF; 0053 0073; 0053 0053; # LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S
0130; 0069 0307; 0130; 0130; # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE

could become:

00DF; 00DF; 0053 0073; 0053 0053; # ß; ß; Ss; SS; LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S;
0130; 0069 0307; 0130; 0130; # İ; i ̇; İ; İ; LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE


Fallback Properties

As a general rule, we should not have the fallback value for a property (the one that we give code points that are not explicitly mentioned) require computation; it should be a single value. Otherwise, it is too error-prone; too easy for programmers to make mistakes when processing the data files.

  1. Bidi_Class (UnicodeData.txt)

    The way that the BIDI class property is handled is very error-prone. We say in UAX #9 that all unassigned code points are given the following values

  2. Unfortunately, this is not repeated in UnicodeData-3.2.0.html (where the properties of UnicodeData.txt are documented). Nor are the relevant R and AL code points listed explicitly in DerivedBidiClass-3.2.0.txt. We should address both of these points: document the ranges in the .html file, and add the code points to DerivedBidiClass.txt.

  3. Joining_Type (ArabicShaping.txt)

    The Joining Type T is also not explicitly listed in ArabicShaping-3.2.0.txt. While in this case, at least the formula for computing T is included in the comments in the file, it would be less error-prone if they were listed explicitly. Those values are already given in DerivedJoiningType-3.2.0.txt.

  4. EastAsianWidth.txt

    The data file says:

    # - Assigned characters that are not listed explicitly are given the value "N".

    It omits telling what the default is for unassigned code points. I assume they are also N, in which case this needs to be changed to:

    # - All code points that are not listed explicitly are given the value "N".

    If they are not all N, then the ones that aren't should be explicitly listed!

  5. LineBreak.txt

    A. The data file says:

    # - Assigned characters that are not listed explicitly are given the value # "AL".
    # - Unassigned characters are given the value "XX".

    The data file actually lists all the characters that are AL, and should. The above should be changed to:

    # - All code points that are not listed explicitly are given the value "XX".
  6. Simple titlecase mapping (field 14 in UnicodeData.txt)

    UnicodeData.html says: "This field is omitted if the titlecase is the same as field 12."

    A user noted that "this is apparently not true, except for 01C5, 01C8, 01CB and 01F2." The data should consistently either omit or include the field (when the same as field 12), and the documentation should match.


Line Break TR

  1. The TR has (LB15b) HY ÷ before (LB18) HY × NU. Since early rules have precedence, the second rule has no effect, meaning that this doesn't allow -3. This needs to be fixed.
  2. Line Break will incorrectly break within Hangul syllables of the form LLVT (note: such syllables are supported on commercial systems, including Microsoft's). This needs to be fixed in 3.2.1 since it is contradictory. It should follow UAX #28, and not break within any valid Hangul syllable, and otherwise break before and after any Jamo.

SpecialCasing and TR21

1. Unfortunately, document L2/01-445, Item 3 was overlooked when doing the fixes for Special Casing in 3.2.0. The data lines:

# When lowercasing, remove dot_above in the sequence I + dot_above, which will turn into i.
# This matches the behavior of the canonically equivalent I-dot_above

0307; ; 0307; 0307; tr After_Soft_Dotted; # COMBINING DOT ABOVE
0307; ; 0307; 0307; az After_Soft_Dotted; # COMBINING DOT ABOVE

do not match the comment (which is correct). They need to be changed to:

# AFTER_I: The last preceding base character was an uppercase I, and
# no combining character class 230 (above) has intervened.
...
# When lowercasing, remove dot_above in the sequence I + dot_above, which will turn into i.
# This matches the behavior of the canonically equivalent I-dot_above

0307; ; 0307; 0307; tr AFTER_I # COMBINING DOT ABOVE
0307; ; 0307; 0307; az AFTER_i # COMBINING DOT ABOVE

Note: This will not have an effect on CaseFolding.

2. In TR21, Definition D1 is as follows:

D1. A character C is defined to be cased if it meets any of the following criteria:

Condition #3 is now redundant, since Uppercase and Lowercase have been 'closed' for #2. It thus does not add any additional characters. Thus #3 should be omitted (although we need to maintain consistency tests to ensure that it is captured in #2).

3. In TR21, there are two places the text needs to be changed to account for edge-cases with subscript-iota.

a. In Section 1.4

For any string X, let Q(X) = NFC(toCasefold(X)). In other words, Q is the result of casefolding X, then putting the result into NFC format...
That is, given R(X) = NFC(toCasefold(X)), there are some strings such that R(R(X)) != R(X).

to

For any string X, let Q(X) = NFC(toCasefold(NFD(X))). In other words, Q is the result of normalizing X, then casefolding the result, then putting the result into NFC format...
That is, given R(X) = NFKC(toCasefold(NFD(X))), there are some strings such that R(R(X)) != R(X).

b. In section 2.5

should be changed to:

Note: The multiple invocations of normalization in the above definitions are to catch relatively infrequent edge cases. In practice, implementations can produce optimized versions that avoid this, treating the edge cases as exceptions if they occur.


New Properties in PropList.txt

1. There are 3 headings in Section 4.2 of TUS (page 79) which are not reflected in the UCD, and thus cannot effectively be used programmatically. If those properties are indeed important, they should be reflected in UCD properties. Each of these properties is a subset of the set of characters with canonical combining class = 0 and general_category = mark. They would be:

Split:

U+09CB..U+09CC # BENGALI VOWEL SIGN O..BENGALI VOWEL SIGN AU
U+0B48 # ORIYA VOWEL SIGN AI
U+0B4B..U+0B4C # ORIYA VOWEL SIGN O..ORIYA VOWEL SIGN AU
U+0BCA..U+0BCC # TAMIL VOWEL SIGN O..TAMIL VOWEL SIGN AU
U+0CC0 # KANNADA VOWEL SIGN II
U+0CC7..U+0CC8 # KANNADA VOWEL SIGN EE..KANNADA VOWEL SIGN AI
U+0CCA..U+0CCB # KANNADA VOWEL SIGN O..KANNADA VOWEL SIGN OO
U+0D4A..U+0D4C # MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN O..MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN AU
U+0DDA # SINHALA VOWEL SIGN DIGA KOMBUVA
U+0DDC..U+0DDE # SINHALA VOWEL SIGN KOMBUVA HAA AELA-PILLA..SINHALA VOWEL SIGN KOMBUVA HAA GAYANUKITTA
U+17BF..U+17C0 # KHMER VOWEL SIGN YA..KHMER VOWEL SIGN IE
U+17C4..U+17C5 # KHMER VOWEL SIGN OO..KHMER VOWEL SIGN AU

Reordrant:

U+093F # DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN I
U+09BF # BENGALI VOWEL SIGN I
U+09C7..U+09C8 # BENGALI VOWEL SIGN E..BENGALI VOWEL SIGN AI
U+0A3F # GURMUKHI VOWEL SIGN I
U+0ABF # GUJARATI VOWEL SIGN I
U+0B47 # ORIYA VOWEL SIGN E
U+0BC6..U+0BC8 # TAMIL VOWEL SIGN E..TAMIL VOWEL SIGN AI
U+0D46..U+0D48 # MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN E..MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN AI
U+0DD9..U+0DDB # SINHALA VOWEL SIGN KOMBUVA..SINHALA VOWEL SIGN KOMBU DEKA
U+1031 # MYANMAR VOWEL SIGN E
U+17BE # KHMER VOWEL SIGN OE
U+17C1..U+17C3 # KHMER VOWEL SIGN E..KHMER VOWEL SIGN AI

Subjoined:

U+0F90..U+0F97 # TIBETAN SUBJOINED LETTER KA..TIBETAN SUBJOINED LETTER JA
U+0F99..U+0FBC # TIBETAN SUBJOINED LETTER NYA..TIBETAN SUBJOINED LETTER FIXED-FORM RA

2. NF*_Stable. There are 4 derived properties that may be useful to add to the UCD, one for each normalization form. They are the set of code points that are always stable: never affected by the normalization process in the current version of Unicode. This property is rather useful for skipping over text that does not need to be considered at all when normalizing.

Formally, each stable code point CP fulfills all the following conditions:

a) CP has canonical combining class 0, and
b) CP is (as a single character) not changed by this normalization form, and
if NKC or NFKC, ALL of the following:
c) CP can never compose with a previous character, and
d) CP can never compose with a following character, and
e) CP can never change if another character is added.

Example: In NFC, a-breve might satisfy all but (e), but if you add an ogonek it changes to a-ogonek + breve. So it is not stable. However, a-ogonek is stable in NFC, since it does satisfy (a-e).

There are pluses and minuses to adding these properties:


PropertyAliases and PropertyValueAliases

  1. Markus noticed that Non_Break was in the PropertyValueAliases.txt file, but not in PropList.txt. It turns out that that name was a holdover from a development version of the property file, and should be deleted in 3.2.1
  2. The block property is missing from PropertyAliases.txt, and values from PropertyValueAliases.txt. Even though we don't want to encourage the use of block, it should be listed.
  3. PropertyAliases.txt do not contain properties from Unihan.txt. Pursuant to
    "[91-A11] Action Item for Mark Davis: Add Unihan properties to the UCD."
    I examined the Unihan tags, and came up with the following categorization. Some of them, while clearly required for IRG work -- should not be considered general-use properties. Others should be, and I propose that they be considered UCD properties, listed in PropertyAliases.txt, and given extracted files. (The latter are very useful when one doesn't want to schlepp around the entire Unihan file.)
Recommended to be included as Properties
Numeric: Completes the other set of numeric properties in the UCD.
Proposed numeric type names: Han_Primary (hp), Han_Accounting (ha), Han_Other (ho)
Variants For foldings and comparison.
Proposed property names: Semantic_Variant (semv), Simplified_Variant (simv), Specialized_Semantic_Variant (specv), Traditional_Variant (tradv), Z_Variant (zv)
kRSUnicode: For indexing and sorting.
Proposed property name: Unicode_Radical_Stroke (urs)
Recommended to be excluded as Properties (e.g. left simply as tags in the Unihan file)
Other Radical/Stroke: Questionable validity; incomplete data
Character Mapping: Logically a part of character mapping tables, not Unicode Properties
Dictionary Position, Definition, Grade: Applicable only to very specific programs
Frequency, Pronunciations Questionable validity; incomplete data
Redundant: derivable from the UCD

Complete list of categorized tags from Unihan

Category Property Name Description from Unihan (abbreviated)
Numeric kAccountingNumeric The value of the character when used in the writing of accounting numerals.
  kOtherNumeric The numeric value for the character in certain unusual, specialized contexts.
  kPrimaryNumeric The value of the character when used in the writing of numbers in the standard fashion.
Variants kSemanticVariant The Unicode value for a semantic variant for this character. A semantic variant is an x- or y-variant with similar or identical meaning which can generally be used in place of the indicated character.
  kSimplifiedVariant The Unicode value for the simplified Chinese variant for this character (if any).
  kSpecializedSemanticVariant The Unicode value for a specialized semantic variant for this character. A specialized semantic variant is an x- or y-variant with similar or identical meaning only in certain contexts (such as accountants' numerals).
  kTraditionalVariant The Unicode value(s) for the traditional Chinese variant(s) for this character.
  kZVariant The Unicode value(s) for known z-variants of this character
Radical/Stroke kRSJapanese A Japanese radical/stroke count for this character in the form "radical.additional strokes".
  kRSKanWa A Morohashi radical/stroke count for this character in the form "radical.additional strokes".
  kRSKangXi A KangXi radical/stroke count for this character in the form "radical.additional strokes".
  kRSKorean A Korean radical/stroke count for this character in the form "radical.additional strokes". A ' after the radical indicates the simplified version of the given radical
  kRSUnicode A standard radical/stroke count for this character in the form "radical.additional strokes". A ' after the radical indicates the simplified version of the given radical
  kTotalStrokes The total number of strokes in the character (including the radical)
Pronunciations kCantonese The Cantonese pronunciation(s) for this character
  kJapaneseKun The Japanese pronunciation(s) of this character
  kJapaneseOn The Sino-Japanese pronunciation(s) of this character
  kKorean The Korean pronunciation(s) of this character
  kMandarin The Mandarin pronunciation(s) for this character in pinyin
  kTang* The Tang dynasty pronunciation(s) of this character, derived from _T'ang Poetic Vocabulary_
  kVietnamese The character's pronunciation(s) in Quốc ngữ
Definition kDefinition An English definition for this character
Frequency kFrequency A rough fequency measurement for the character based on analysis of Chinese USENET postings
Grade kGradeLevel* The grade in the Hong Kong school system by which a student is expected to know the character.
Dictionary Position kAlternateKangXi An alternate possible position for the character in the KangXi dictionary
  kAlternateMorohashi An alternate possible position for the character in the Morohashi dictionary
  kCihaiT* The position of this character in the Cihai (辭海) dictionary, single volume edition, published in Hong Kong by the Zhonghua Bookstore, 1983 (reprint of the 1947 edition), ISBN 962-231-005-2.
  kCowles* The index of this character in Roy T. Cowles, _A Pocket Dictionary of Cantonese_, Hong Kong: University Press, 1999.
  kDaeJaweon The position of this character in the Dae Jaweon (Korean) dictionary used in the four-dictionary sorting algorithm.
  kFenn* Data on the character from _Fenn's Chinese-English Pocket Dictionary_
  kHanYu The position of this character in the Hanyu Da Zidian (HDZ) Chinese character dictionary (bibliographic information below).
  kHKGlyph* The index of the character in 常用字字形表 (二零零零年修訂本), 香港: 香港教育學院, 2000, ISBN 962-949-040-4. This publication gives the "proper" shapes for characters as used in the Hong Kong school system.
  kIRGDaeJaweon The position of this character in the Dae Jaweon (Korean) dictionary used in the four-dictionary sorting algorithm.
  kIRGDaiKanwaZiten The index of this character in the Dae Kanwa Ziten, aka Morohashi dictionary (Japanese) used in the four-dictionary sorting algorithm.
  kIRGHanyuDaZidian The position of this character in the Hanyu Da Zidian (PRC) dictionary used in the four-dictionary sorting algorithm.
  kIRGKangXi The position of this character in the KangXi dictionary used in the four-dictionary sorting algorithm.
  kKangXi The position of this character in the KangXi dictionary used in the four-dictionary sorting algorithm.
  kKarlgren* The index of this character in _Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese_
  kLau* The index of this character in _A Practical Cantonese-English Dictionary_
  kMatthews The index of this character in _Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary_
  kMeyerWempe* The index of this character in the Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary
  kMorohashi The index of this character in the Dae Kanwa Ziten, aka Morohashi dictionary (Japanese) used in the four-dictionary sorting algorithm.
  kNelson The index of this character in _The Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary_
  kPhonetic* The phonetic index for the character from _Ten Thousand Characters: An Analytic Dictionary_
  kSBGY The position of this character in the Song Ben Guang Yun (SBGY) Medieval Chinese character dictionary (bibliographic and general information below).
  kCangjie* The cangjie input code for the character. This incorporates data from the file cangjie-table.b5 by Christian Wittern
Character Mapping kBigFive The Big Five mapping for this character in hex; note that this does *not* cover any of the Big Five extensions in common use, including the ETEN extensions.
  kCCCII The CCCII mapping for this character in hex
  kCNS1986 The CNS 11643-1986 mapping for this character in hex
  kCNS1992 The CNS 11643-1992 mapping for this character in hex
  kEACC The EACC mapping for this character in hex
  kGB0 The GB 2312-80 mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kGB1 The GB 12345-90 mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kGB3 The GB 7589-87 mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kGB5 The GB 7590-87 mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kGB7 The "General Use Characters for Modern Chinese" mapping for this character
  kGB8 The GB 8565-89 mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kHKSCS Mappings to the Big Five extended code points used for the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set
  kIBMJapan The IBM Japanese mapping for this character in hex
  kIRG_GSource The IRG "G" source mapping for this character in hex. The IRG "G" source consists of data from the following national standards, publications, and lists from the People's Republic of China and Singapore.
  kIRG_HSource The IRG "H" source mapping for this character in hex. The IRG "H" source consists of data from the Hong Kong Supplementary Characer Set.
  kIRG_JSource The IRG "J" source mapping for this character in hex. The IRG "J" source consists of data from the following national standards and lists from Japan.
  kIRG_KSource The IRG "K" source mapping for this character in hex. The IRG "K" source consists of data from the following national standards and lists from the Republic of Korea (South Korea).
  kIRG_KPSource The IRG "KP" source mapping for this character in hex. The IRG "KP" source consists of data from the following national standards and lists from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).
  kIRG_TSource The IRG "T" source mapping for this character in hex. The IRG "T" source consists of data from the following national standards and lists from the Republic of China (Taiwan).
  kIRG_VSource The IRG "V" source mapping for this character in hex. The IRG "V" source consists of data from the following national standards and lists from Vietnam.
  kJIS0213 The JIS X 0213-2000 mapping for this character in min,ku,ten form
  kJis0 The JIS X 0208-1990 mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kJis1 The JIS X 0212-1990 mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kKPS0 The KP 9566-97 mapping for this character in hexadecimal form.
  kKPS1 The KPS 10721-2000 mapping for this character in hexadecimal form.
  kKSC0 The KS X 1001:1992 (KS C 5601-1989) mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kKSC1 The KS X 1002:1991 (KS C 5657-1991) mapping for this character in ku/ten form
  kMainlandTelegraph The PRC telegraph code for this character, derived from "Kanzi denpou koudo henkan-hyou"
  kPseudoGB1 A "GB 12345-90" code point assigned this character for the purposes of including it within Unihan.
  kTaiwanTelegraph The Taiwanese telegraph code for this character, derived from "Kanzi denpou koudo henkan-hyou"
  kXerox The Xerox code for this character
Redundant kCompatibilityVariant* The compatibility decomposition for this ideograph, derived from the UnicodeData.txt file.

 

Background Information

The following lists each Unihan tag, the total number of characters with that tag found in Unihan.txt, the minimum and lengths of the values associated with the tag, and a few sample values (separated by semicolons). Don't worry if some of the less common CJK characters appear as boxes on your machine; they are only examples.

  1. kAccountingNumeric
  2. kAlternateKangXi
  3. kAlternateMorohashi
  4. kBigFive
  5. kCCCII
  6. kCNS1986
  7. kCNS1992
  8. kCangjie
  9. kCantonese
  10. kCihaiT
  11. kCompatibilityVariant
  12. kCowles
  13. kDaeJaweon
  14. kDefinition
  15. kEACC
  16. kFenn
  17. kFrequency
  18. kGB0
  19. kGB1
  20. kGB3
  21. kGB5
  22. kGB7
  23. kGB8
  24. kGradeLevel
  25. kHKGlyph
  26. kHKSCS
  27. kHanYu
  28. kIBMJapan
  29. kIRGDaeJaweon
  30. kIRGDaiKanwaZiten
  31. kIRGHanyuDaZidian
  32. kIRGKangXi
  33. kIRG_GSource
  34. kIRG_HSource
  35. kIRG_JSource
  36. kIRG_KPSource
  37. kIRG_KSource
  38. kIRG_TSource
  39. kIRG_VSource
  40. kJIS0213
  41. kJapaneseKun
  42. kJapaneseOn
  43. kJis0
  44. kJis1
  45. kKPS0
  46. kKPS1
  47. kKSC0
  48. kKSC1
  49. kKangXi
  50. kKarlgren
  51. kKorean
  52. kLau
  53. kMainlandTelegraph
  54. kMandarin
  55. kMatthews
  56. kMeyerWempe
  57. kMorohashi
  58. kNelson
  59. kOtherNumeric
  60. kPhonetic
  61. kPrimaryNumeric
  62. kPseudoGB1
  63. kRSJapanese
  64. kRSKanWa
  65. kRSKangXi
  66. kRSKorean
  67. kRSUnicode
  68. kSBGY
  69. kSemanticVariant
  70. kSimplifiedVariant
  71. kSpecializedSemanticVariant
  72. kTaiwanTelegraph
  73. kTang
  74. kTotalStrokes
  75. kTraditionalVariant
  76. kVietnamese
  77. kXerox
  78. kZVariant

Note: I have also run across some problems in some of the 'provisional' data; I have filed a bug directly with John on those.