General
This section is an online CangJie dictionary. The method may be used to input virtually any hieroglyphs, which is what we usually call 'characters'; and it does not depend on the operational system locale settings, nor a language character set itself. It 'types' characters.
One must not possess some special skills to use the dictionary while searching for a particular character code. It is enough just to fill in the lookup form with desired key combination or just a character under question (this form one always can see in the upper right corner of the page) and push the search button. The application will look up the database for the user's input and output the results, if any. It is necessary to say that application responds only for the queries compiled with the Basic Latin letters (upper- and lowercase) without any diactrical marks as well as any characters belonging to CJK as of Unicode. However, the site lookup facility creators kept in mind Chinese first.
Finally, it is quite possible, that not all users (including those familiar with CangJie) are fully aware of the method capability to serve hieroglyphs of various languages; that's why and because of the Unicode consortium guys are two steps ahead of OS manufacturers, the users may come across results that their operating system isn't able to display properly. No worries, just remember about this - it's through nobody's fault.
Lookup rules
The possible searches may be results of both character and letter input, with one or more letter codes, but no more than five in any case. The latter is restricted by the method creators, who designed the method with five-letter combinations as the longest and one-letter code as the shortest.
In order to make the lookup more efficient, we strongly recommend the user to look through the manual, which is also placed at the site (or just learn the whole thing).
The more general case of the dictionary use is an approximate search. It is different from what was said above in its ability to widen the queries while using the underscore '_' mark as a placeholder for the uncertain or unknown letter in the searched combination. It makes possible to list all key codes available in the database and within the number of characters the user has defined in the query.
Search examples
To make it more obvious we put the table with examples of searches:
| Search | Combination | Results |
|---|---|---|
| simple search | PTA | 惜 (1 hieroglyph) |
| approximate search | P_A | 惜 ... 怕, 恂 (6 hieroglyphs) |
| with the 1st letter | P__ | ... (many) |
| with the last letter | __A | ... (many) |
| "blind" search | ___ | ... (too many) |
As one can see from the table the first example of search may be called simple or checking: one combination may produce from one to six (as far as we know) combinations.
Second to fourth may give more numerous hits, and this is natural as we used placeholders for them; but, please, keep in mind that the number of possible combinations is limited to the number of placeholders put into the query and the number of combinations available in the lookup table, that corresponds to the former.
The last, or "blind" case will spit out all available combinations for that number of placeholders. The case like this one are of no practical value as probably the user has no particular purpose to search or he doesn't know what he's doing at all. Do avoid doing that, please.
