Just as an interesting project, and for occasional use, I wrote a shortcut that displays the decimal ID of characters of selected text followed by the actual character or its description. For example:
A few comments:
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The shortcut seems to work with languages other than English, but I can’t be sure.
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To reduce execution time, the shortcut creates a list of characters and a list of character IDs. An error is reported if the number of items in these lists are not the same. A more reliable approach would be to get the character IDs with AppleScript (or the shell), and then to get the corresponding character with an AppleScript, but that approach was slow. If things get out of sync it would probably be obvious.
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Characters can be composed of multiple code points, and, in that circumstance, I think the character would be decomposed and an equal number of character IDs would be reported, but I’m not sure of that.
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Character descriptions are used when a character is not visible. The list of character descriptions can be expanded when required.
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The shortcut gets the character IDs of the selected text by way of AppleScript code run by the
osascriptshell command in a Run Shell Script action. After testing alternatives, this seemed the best choice. -
The following screenshot only shows a potion of the shortcut.
Character ID.shortcut (24.5 KB)