Jeni's Musings

Whatever algorithm you use to calculate Levenshtein distance, one of its great features is that you can tweak the cost of letter substitutions. For example, you can do a case-insensitive comparison of two strings, or perhaps more interestingly a semi-case-sensitive comparison of two strings, where the cost of replacing a character for its upper or lower case equivalent is less than the cost of replacing a character with an unrelated character, but more than zero. But that requires knowledge of whether and how two characters are related.

Of course all that information is stored in the Unicode Database, which are a bunch of text files in a structured format. I looked for an XML version but couldn’t find one (well, Googling “Unicode database XML” isn’t much help). So I downloaded UnicodeData.txt and NamesList.txt and put together an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet to create an XML version of the Unicode database.