Install uni2ascii with Homebrew, apt, MacPorts, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• ascii2uni
• u2a
• uni2ascii

Project history

The project originated as a Unicode escape conversion utility and, by version 2.0, replaced the original Python implementation with a C program. The author's changelog says that rewrite added more output forms, improved speed and error reporting, and handled the entire Unicode range rather than only the BMP.

Version 2.1 added `ascii2uni`, the inverse program that converts ASCII escape forms back to UTF-8 Unicode. Later releases expanded the set of recognized notations and moved from many separate format flags to the single `-a` format selector in version 4.0.

The official homepage lists version 4.20 as current and last modified on 2019-06-28, while the published changelog on the page highlights 2010-2011 maintenance around Debian and NetBSD bug fixes, POSIX portability, and conversion semantics.

Adoption history

The official homepage explicitly lists package links for Arch Linux, Debian stable/testing/unstable, FreeBSD, MacPorts, Fink, OpenPackage, Red Hat/Fedora RPMs, SUSE, and Ubuntu. The supplied package facts show continuing package-manager presence in Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, MacPorts, and Nix.

This is a classic small Unix utility adoption story: the upstream site provides tarballs and manpages, while operating-system distributions make the commands available for scripts, build systems, documentation tooling, and text-cleanup workflows.

How it is used

`uni2ascii` reads UTF-8 text and writes an ASCII representation such as HTML numeric references, URI escapes, quoted-printable, U+ notation, programming-language escapes, or approximate ASCII replacements. The official page gives pipeline examples where `ascii2uni` and `uni2ascii` are chained to convert one escape syntax to another through Unicode.

The manpage documents stdin/stdout behavior and many format choices, so the tool fits shell pipelines. The homepage also calls out practical use cases: embedding Unicode in program source, debugging, and entering Unicode into systems that can process Unicode but are not 8-bit clean.

Why package nerds care

uni2ascii matters to package and shell users because it solves a narrow but persistent portability problem: moving Unicode text through tools, source files, logs, markup, and legacy systems that expect ASCII-safe representations.

Its niche is older and lower-level than modern Unicode pickers. Where `uni` helps identify and search characters, uni2ascii is about conversion formats and reversible or approximate transformations, which makes it valuable in scripts and regression tests.

Timeline

• Version 2.0: Original Python program replaced by a faster C implementation.
• Version 2.1: `ascii2uni` added as the inverse of `uni2ascii`.
• Version 4.0: Format selection consolidated under the `-a` option.
• 2011: Version 4.18 changelog records Debian and NetBSD-related fixes.
• 2019: Homepage lists version 4.20 and last modification date 2019-06-28.

Related projects

• The official page names enca, iconv, recode, and uniconv for conversion between UTF-8 and other encodings.
• The same page points to Bill Poser's ascii2binary/binary2ascii and Unicode Utilities suite for adjacent text and Unicode inspection tasks.

Sources

• https://www.billposer.org/Software/Uni2AsciiChangeLog.html
• https://www.billposer.org/Software/uni2ascii.html
• https://www.billposer.org/Software/uni2ascii_man.html
• input.source_facts.package-manager