Question

I am looking into the icu package for java. What I am looking for as a way of passing a given locale and a given codepoint and getting a list of characters that are “equivalent”.

I looking at the POSIX charclass for [=e=] in French, what are all the characters equivalent in French to ‘e’? e, é, è and ê

I looked at the icu package which everyone seems to be using, and didn’t find a way to do this.

NOTE: this seems to be the reverse of another question.

Andy

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by equivalent, but you can use a Collator to see which characters would be sorted together. You can get the default collator from the Locale:

Collator.getInstance(Locale.FRANCE);

Casting this to a RuleBasedCollator allows you to do:

((RuleBasedCollator)Collator.getInstance(Locale.FRANCE)).getRules();

Which will show you the equivalence table.