This is a small C++ library and accompanying driver program which transliterates UTF-8 strings of kana (Japanese phonetic characters) into romaji (Latin letters). Special care was taken to handle all variety of inputs, including some exotic edge cases.

The driver program kana_to_romaji is a command-line tool which converts its argument from a UTF-8 encoded string of kana into romaji on stdout. It is built with

make

or

make kana_to_romaji

To build the driver program and perform unit tests, use

make test

Simple cases work as is to be expected.

./kana_to_romaji ひらがな
hiragana

./kana_to_romaji カタカナ
katakana

./kana_to_romaji はっぴょう
happyou

./kana_to_romaji つくって
tsukutte

./kana_to_romaji ふじさん
fujisan

./kana_to_romaji ぎゅうにゅう
gyuunyuu

./kana_to_romaji じんじゃ
jinja

Special consonant-vowel combinations which are not common to native Japanese words work as well.

./kana_to_romaji パーティー
paatii

./kana_to_romaji タトゥー
tatuu

./kana_to_romaji クァルテット
kwarutetto

Perhaps one of the more interesting cases is the various spellings of "Whiskey."

./kana_to_romaji ウィスキー
wisukii

./kana_to_romaji ウイスキー
uisukii

./kana_to_romaji ウヰスキー
uwisukii