Question

How to determine if a character is a Chinese character using ruby？

Answer 1

An interesting article on encodings in Ruby: http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/bytes_and_characters_in_ruby_18 (it’s part of a series – check the table of contents at the start of the article also)

I haven’t used chinese characters before but this seems to be the list supported by unicode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_Unified_Ideographs . Also take note that it’s a unified system including Japanese and Korean characters (some characters are shared between them) – not sure if you can distinguish which are Chinese only.

I think you can check if it’s a CJK character by calling this on string str and character with index n:

def check_char(str, n)
  list_of_chars = str.unpack("U*")
  char = list_of_chars[n]
  #main blocks
  if char >= 0x4E00 && char <= 0x9FFF
    return true
  end
  #extended block A
  if char >= 0x3400 && char <= 0x4DBF
    return true
  end
  #extended block B
  if char >= 0x20000 && char <= 0x2A6DF
    return true
  end
  #extended block C
  if char >= 0x2A700 && char <= 0x2B73F
    return true
  end
  return false
end