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What Is the General Category?

Every Unicode character is assigned a General Category (GC): a two-letter code that classifies it into a broad type such as uppercase letter, decimal digit, currency symbol, or control character. The category is one of the most fundamental Unicode properties and drives countless text-processing decisions—from determining whether a character is "alphabetic" to how it should be handled in identifier parsing.

There are seven top-level categories (Letter, Mark, Number, Punctuation, Symbol, Separator, Other) subdivided into 30 specific categories.

The 30 Category Codes

import unicodedata

samples = [("A", "Lu?"), ("a", "Ll?"), ("1", "Nd?"),
           ("中", "Lo?"), (" ", "Zs?"), ("©", "So?")]

for char, expected in samples:
    gc = unicodedata.category(char)
    print(f"  {char!r:6}  category={gc:4}  ({expected})")

# 'A'   category=Lu    (Lu?)
# 'a'   category=Ll    (Ll?)
# '1'   category=Nd    (Nd?)
# '中'  category=Lo    (Lo?)
# ' '   category=Zs    (Zs?)
# '©'   category=So    (So?)

Common Uses

Python's own str.isalpha(), str.isdigit(), and str.identifier rules are all defined in terms of General Category. Regex \w matches characters in L, N, Pc, and a few others. Security-sensitive applications use GC to detect confusable characters: two characters with GC=Ll (lowercase letter) that look similar but come from different scripts could be used in homograph attacks.

Quick Facts