Unicode Transliteration

philkime has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am looking for a good transliteration module able to cope with a range of scripts. There is Unicode ::Transliterate which is old but still seems to compile and work with current ICU libraries. However, it's said to be alpha quality and has a lot of compiler warnings. Lingua::Translit doesn't have very many scripts (no Indic) but is extensible. I tried to write a mapping for Latin<->Devanagari but it's all data rule driven which makes defining new mappings a pain - no coding, just XML rules with no control over NFC/NFD etc. Lingua::Deva seems to work but it's just for Devanagari and I'd prefer something more general. So, does anyone know what happened to PICU - the "wrapper for ICU"? ICU is the way to go but as far as I know, there has never been a decent perl wrapper for this. I heard rumours that perl6 would use ICU internally but that was, like a lot of perl6 news, years and years ago ...

Comment on Unicode Transliteration

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Re: Unicode Transliteration by Corion (Patriarch) on Mar 24, 2016 at 19:34 UTC
I don't know if you're tied to ICU, but I've had good experience with Text::Unidecode, which turns Unicode strings (back to) Roman text data.	[reply]
Re^2: Unicode Transliteration by philkime (Beadle) on Mar 24, 2016 at 20:09 UTC
Thanks for the recommendation but I should have said that I need conversion between strict standards-based scripts like IAST and Devenagari and that module just (quite well apparently) lets you do a helpful ASCII transliteration. Specifically, I need to be able to do things like IAST Sanskrit -> Devanagari as this is the way to collate such languages.	[reply]
Re: Unicode Transliteration by zwon (Abbot) on Mar 24, 2016 at 22:23 UTC
However, it's said to be alpha quality and has a lot of compiler warnings. But does it work for you? BTW, I see only three deprecation warnings when build it on Ubuntu with libicu52	[reply]
Re^2: Unicode Transliteration by philkime (Beadle) on Mar 24, 2016 at 22:28 UTC
I rebuilt and fixed the warnings and it does now appear to build cleanly - a real tribute to the backwards compat of ICU ... I have to wait until my Sanskrit source can verify if the transliteration looks ok ...	[reply]
Re^3: Unicode Transliteration by philkime (Beadle) on Mar 25, 2016 at 16:12 UTC
Apparently not. It seems that ICU doesn't support IAST, only the more general and different ISO15919. Ah well, perhaps I will have to fight with Lingua::Translit.	[reply]
Re: Unicode Transliteration by captainjames (Novice) on Dec 23, 2018 at 05:42 UTC
> So, does anyone know what happened to PICU - the "wrapper for ICU"? I was the co-author of PICU back in 2002. The source is still online, but I don't believe you will be able to build it 2 decades later without significant effort.	[reply]