language.md

Language

Operations for working with human-language text. Some are shared with Data format, where their detailed descriptions, options and examples live: Decode text, Encode text and Unescape Unicode Characters.

Operations are listed alphabetically.

Operation	Subcommand	Reference
Convert Leet Speak	convert-leet-speak	Leet
Convert to NATO alphabet	convert-to-nato-alphabet	NATO phonetic alphabet
Decode text	decode-text	Data format
Encode text	encode-text	Data format
Remove Diacritics	remove-diacritics	Diacritic
Unescape Unicode Characters	unescape-unicode-characters	Data format
Unicode Text Format	unicode-text-format	Combining character

Convert Leet Speak

Converts to and from Leet Speak. Six letters trade places with digits — a e i o s t against 4 3 1 0 5 7 — and everything else passes through. Going to leet either case of the letter becomes the digit; coming back the digit becomes the lowercase letter, since a digit carries no case to restore.

Option	Type	Default	Notes
--direction	option	To Leet Speak	Or From Leet Speak.

Simple example

cchef convert-leet-speak -i "leet speak is cool"

Output:

l337 5p34k 15 c00l

Complex example

Coming back, letters keep their case but recovered ones are lowercase:

cchef convert-leet-speak --direction "From Leet Speak" -i "H3LL0 W0RLD"

Output:

HeLLo WoRLD

Convert to NATO alphabet

Spells letters, digits and the punctuation , / . out in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Each spelled character carries its own trailing space; anything else — other punctuation, spaces, accented text — passes through unchanged. The operation takes no options.

Simple example

cchef convert-to-nato-alphabet -i "Go 4 it."

Output:

Golf Oscar  Four  India Tango Full stop 

(The doubled spaces are the input's own spaces following a spelled character's trailing space.)

Remove Diacritics

Replaces accented characters with their plain equivalents by decomposing to Unicode NFD and dropping the combining diacritical marks, so Unicode text formatting such as strikethroughs and underlines is removed too. A character whose accent is part of the letter itself rather than a combining mark (ø, đ, ß) has nothing to strip and survives. The operation takes no options.

Simple example

cchef remove-diacritics -i "naïve façade Zürich"

Output:

naive facade Zurich

Unicode Text Format

Formats plaintext by adding Unicode combining characters: U+0336 for strikethrough and U+0332 for underline, after every character, so the text carries its formatting anywhere Unicode is rendered.

Option	Type	Default	Notes
--underline	boolean	false	Add a combining low line to each character.
--strikethrough	boolean	false	Add a combining long stroke to each character.

One departure from CyberChef, fixing a fault in its version (also logged upstream): it inserts the combining characters after every byte, splitting multi-byte characters into invalid UTF-8 and destroying any text beyond ASCII. cchef appends them after each whole character. ASCII input matches CyberChef byte for byte.

Simple example

cchef unicode-text-format -i "hello" --underline

Output:

h̲e̲l̲l̲o̲

Complex example

The combining characters are ordinary bytes in the output, visible under a hex view — each cc b6 is the strikethrough mark following a character:

cchef unicode-text-format -i "hi" --strikethrough | cchef to-hex

Output:

68 cc b6 69 cc b6