Find characters that are similar glyphically in Unicode?

Question

Lets say I have the characters Ú, Ù, Ü. All of them are similar glyphically to the English U.

Is there some list or algorithm to do this:

• Given a Ú or Ù or Ü return the English U
• Given a English U, return the list of all U-similar characters

I'm not sure if the code point of the Unicode characters is the same across all fonts? If it is, I suppose there could be some easy way and efficient to do this?

UPDATE

If you're using Ruby, there is a gem available unicode-confusable for this that may help in some cases.

Answer 1

This won't work for all conditions, but one way to get rid of most accents is to convert the characters to their decomposed form, then throw away the combining accents:

# coding: utf8
import unicodedata as ud
s=u'U, Ù, Ú, Û, Ü, Ũ, Ū, Ŭ, Ů, Ű, Ų, Ư, Ǔ, Ǖ, Ǘ, Ǚ, Ǜ, Ụ, Ủ, Ứ, Ừ, Ử, Ữ, Ự'
print ud.normalize('NFD',s).encode('ascii','ignore')

Output

U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U, U

To find accent characters, use something like:

import unicodedata as ud
import string

def asc(unichr):
    return ud.normalize('NFD',unichr).encode('ascii','ignore')

U = u''.join(unichr(i) for i in xrange(65536))
for c in string.letters:
    print u''.join(u for u in U if asc(u) == c)

Output

aàáâãäåāăąǎǟǡǻȁȃȧḁạảấầẩẫậắằẳẵặ
bḃḅḇ
cçćĉċčḉ
dďḋḍḏḑḓ
eèéêëēĕėęěȅȇȩḕḗḙḛḝẹẻẽếềểễệ
fḟ
 :
etc.