.NET Core Cyrillic to Latin Transliteration Utility (C#)
cyrillic-to-latin is a command-line utility that transliterates modern Cyrillic characters to their Latin equivalents. It uses a modified Library of Congress system for transliteration. Its syntax is:
CyrillicToLatin <sourceFile> <destinationFile>
where sourceFile is the path and filename of a text file that contains modern Cyrillic characters, and destinationFile is the name of the text file that will store the original text with its Cyrillic characters replaced by transliterated Latin characters. If a file path is included in destinationFile and any portion of that path does not exist, the utility terminates.
The specific mappings of upper- and lower-case Cyrillic characters
to Latin characters are listed in the constructor of the CyrillicToLatinFallback
class, where the entries of a case mapping table named table are defined.
The utility illustrates the extensibility of character encoding in the .NET Framework. An encoding system consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder is responsible for translating a sequence of characters into a sequence of bytes. The decoder is responsible for translating the sequence of bytes into a sequence of characters. .NET Core supports ASCII as well as the standard Unicode encodings and allows the Encoding class to be overridden to support otherwise unsupported encodings. It also allows an encoder and a decoder's handling of unmapped characters and bytes to be customized. Broadly, an encoder or a decoder can handle data that it cannot map by throwing an exception or by using some alternate mapping. For more information, see Character Encoding in .NET Framework.
The transliteration utility works by instantiating an Encoding object that represents ASCII encoding, which supports ASCII characters in the range from U+00 to U+FF. Because modern Cyrillic characters occupy the range from U+0410 to U+044F, they do not automatically map to ASCII encoding. When the utility instantiates its Encoding object, it passes its constructor an instance of a class named CyrillicToLatinFallback that is derived from EncoderFallback. This class maintains an internal table that maps modern Cyrillic characters to one or more Latin characters.
When the encoder encounters a character that it cannot encode, it calls the fallback
object's CreateFallbackBuffer method. This method instantiates a CyrillicToLatinFallbackBuffer object (a subclass of the EncoderFallbackBuffer class) and passes its constructor
the modern Cyrillic character mapping table. It then passes the CyrillicToLatinFallbackBuffer
object's Fallback method each character that it is unable to encode, and if a mapping is available, the method can provide a suitable replacement.