How to print Russian alphabet from console?

[Siegfried Heintze]

The following perl program works when I run it from urxvt-X console on
cygwin-x windows when running on Microsoft Windows XP:

LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 urxvt-X.exe&
perl -wle "binmode STDOUT, q[:utf8]; print chr() for 0x410 .. 0x430;"

This little one liner prints the Russian alphabet in Cyrillic. With some
slight modification it will also print a lot of other alphabets too --
including Hebrew, chinese and japanese.

It does not work with cmd.exe because apparently cmd.exe cannot deal with
UTF-8.

Can someone help me translate it into groovy? I would not expect it to work
from cmd.exe with groovy, but I am hopeful it will work with urxvt-X!

Thanks,
Siegfried

[Matthew Taylor]

Well, I can help you a bit. As far as how to have urxvt-x print the characters to the console, you are on your own. What I can help with is creating a range of hex values for your to work with and passing each to a command on the command line:

def hexRange = (Integer.parseInt('410',16)..Integer.parseInt('430',16))
hexRange.each {
    "urxvt-X.exe $it".execute()
}

This 'hexRange' will get your a Groovy Range object containing the hex values you want. You can pass them to a command line script by calling execute() on a GString that contains your command as shown.
[ October 01, 2008: Message edited by: Matthew Taylor ]

[Siegfried Heintze]

I don't think I follow your logic here. Are you spawning the console shell for each letter? I don't think that is what I want.

I need to know the name of the function that is the counterpart to perl's "binmode" that tells the shell's codec that that we want to emit UTF8 (or UTF-16 I don't care) and the java (or groovy) System.out object needs to convert double byte char objects to UTF-8 (or, in the case of UTF-16 I believe no conversion is necessary).

I think by default, the codec in System.out takes the double byte char objects and converts them to ASCII since cmd.exe is brain damaged.

(Although, I did discover the "chcp 1251" command for cmd.exe that will allow me to print the russian alphabet using a python program. I have to remember to use the non-default font of Lucidia).

Perhaps this question is more appropriate for a java forum?

Thanks!
Siegfried

[Marc Peabody]

I'm not sure how to get the System.out console in Java to use Russian characters off the top of my head.

You can always dump it to a Swing window very easily though. Try dropping the following code into a GroovyConsole window and executing it.

import groovy.swing.SwingBuilder
 
def frame = new SwingBuilder().frame(title:'Russian', size:[300,300]) {
  // get the characters using a range of unicode code points
  def alphabet =  ("\u0410".."\u04F9").toList()
  // insert a line break every 50 characters
  ((alphabet.size())..1).findAll{ it%50==0 }.each{ alphabet.add(it, '\n\r') }
  // put alphabet in window as a text pane
  textPane(text:alphabet.join())
}
frame.pack()
frame.show()

[Anthony Nassar]

To generate the Cyrillic alphabet:

def alphabet = (0x0410..0x0fff).collect { (char) it }.join()

Java (and therefore Groovy) does recognize the case of Cyrillic characters, so Character#isUpperCase() and isLowerCase() both work, as do /\p{Lu}/ and /\p{Ll}/. /\p{Cyrillic}/, unfortunately, does not work.

The Groovy console has trouble with Cyrillic characters, so be careful; what you see might not be what you're getting.