The Unicode PowerShell module

After authoring last month scripting games puzzle, which involved some scripting around the Unicode standard, I decided to have some fun and write a PowerShell module which interacts directly with the online Unicode Database (UCD) to retrieve the main properties of characters.

Using this module you will be able to retrieve the following information for a single char or for every char in a given string:

• Glyph name
• General category
• Unicode script
• Unicode block
• Unicode version (or age)
• Decimal value
• Hex value
  Here’s a few sample outputs you can get from using the functions in the UnicodeInfo module:

Get-Unicodeinfo '$' Glyph : $ Decimal value : 36 Hexadecimal value : U+0024 General Category : CurrencySymbol Unicode name : DOLLAR SIGN Unicode script : Common Unicode block : BasicLatin Unicode version : 1.1Get-Unicodeinfo ‘Powershell!’ | Format-Table Glyph Decimal value Hexadecimal value General Category Unicode name Unicode script Unicode block Unicode version

The JAPE challenge

I have wanted to write my very own obfuscated e-mail signature for a long time but kept myself from doing it. At the time I thought of all these lines of obfuscated code that people wrote during competitions such as the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) or the Obfuscated Perl Contest as beyond interest.

Then I started competing in the Scripting Games, and some tasks involved writing Powershell oneliners that required mastering the use of the pipeline as a tool to refine what each cmdlet passed to another. Once I added a few aliases to these oneliners - which sometimes happened to involve pretty arcane regular expressions - I often came back with hard-to-read and impossible-to-maintain pieces of Powershell code. But, hey, this was fun!