List all fonts known to fontconfig that provide glyph for given characters.

gistfile1.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# klg, May 2014
import fontconfig
import sys

chars = list(''.join(sys.argv[1:]))
if not len(chars):
    sys.exit(0)

fonts = fontconfig.query()

def progress(i):
    message = '\rSearching fonts ... {0} / {1} \033[K'
    sys.stderr.write(message.format(i, len(fonts)))
    sys.stderr.flush()

def clear():
    sys.stderr.write('\r\033[K')
    sys.stderr.flush()

for i in range(len(fonts)):
    if i % 17 == 0:
        progress(i)
    x = [ch for ch in chars if fonts[i].has_char(ch)]
    if len(x):
        x = ' '.join(['{:04X}'.format(ord(ch)) for ch in x])
        path = fonts[i].file
        clear()
        print('{}: {}'.format(x, path))
        progress(i)
clear()

I stopped using this script long time ago when I realized that fontconfig cache can be queried much more effectively using fc-list ':charset=XXXX' where XXXX is a hexadecimal Unicode code point, or a comma-separated list of such.