Unicode Confusable

Using Swift
1

I am working on a project that needs to analyze whether a string can be confused with another (mainly for cybersecurity reasons).

Since I couldn’t find any existing Swift package for this, I went ahead and naively ported one which is OK for my POC.

As I need this functionality in a more robust form and believe it could be valuable to others, I am considering creating an open-source package dedicated to it. I am not an expert in Unicode, and I know this is a tricky subject, so I’m reaching out for guidance on the right direction and to gather potential requirements from people interested in such a package.

Current state:

I have read UTR #36: Unicode Security Considerations and UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms

I quickly ported the following Python package to Swift : GitHub - woodgern/confusables: A python package providing functionality for matching words using different characters but appearing to be a similar/the same word.

I tried embedding all the data directly inside a Swift file to avoid parsing resource data when initializing the package, but that broke the compiler, making it requiring tens of Go of RAM (the data type is a Dictionary<Character, Set<String>>).

I’m wondering: what is the recommended practice for embedding large amounts of data in code for efficient loading?

Also, when looking at different implementations of confusables (for example, this Rust crate: confusables - Rust ), I’ve noticed that what is considered “confusable” can vary significantly.

2

You mean this file specifically or something else? It is JSONDecodable in just a tenth of a second so you could use it as a resource loadable in runtime.

3

Thanks for your feedback!

Yes it was my first plan to follow the python library strategy but I wanted to try to integrate the data directly into the swift code which led to compiler hangs/crashes (by lack of RAM)