Removing Vowels from Hebrew Unicode Text

2005_06_03-remove_vowels_from_hebrew.js

/*
* One of the questions that recently came up is how to remove vowels from Hebrew characters in Unicode
* (or any other similar language). A quick look at Hebrew Unicode chart shows that the vowels are all
* located between 0x0591 (1425) and 0x05C7 (1479). With this and Javascript's charCodeAt function, it
* is trivial to strip them out with Javascript as follows
*
* Live demo is available here:
* https://jsfiddle.net/js0ge7gn/
*/

function stripVowels(rawString)
{
	var newString = '';
	for(j=0; j<rawString.length; j++) {
		if(rawString.charCodeAt(j)<1425
			 || rawString.charCodeAt(j)>1479)
		{ newString = newString + rawString.charAt(j); }
	}
	return(newString);
}

/* @shimondoodkin suggested even a much shorter way to do this */
function stripVowels2(rawString) {
  return rawString.replace(/[\u0591-\u05C7]/g,"")
}

Thanks for the ideas above. I imported all the data in an Excel spreadsheet and couldn't find a way to do it elegantly using a regexreplace function, say.

This is a bit brute-force, but it worked for me and only took about 10 seconds to convert around 10,000 words and sentences:

Function stripVowels(rawString)
Dim stripped As String
stripped = rawString
For H = 1425 To 1479
stripped = Replace(stripped, ChrW(H), "")
Next
stripVowels = stripped
End Function

And then just type "=stripVowels(A2)" in the cell(s) where you want nikkud-less Hebrew text (obviously replace "A2" with whatever the cell is of the original text).

:)

Here's the variation required for a Word Find-and-Replace macro:

Sub StripNkudot()
Application.DisplayAlerts = False
For H = 1425 To 1479
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = ChrW(H)
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchKashida = False
.MatchDiacritics = False
.MatchAlefHamza = False
.MatchControl = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute replace:=wdReplaceAll
Next
Application.DisplayAlerts = True
End Sub

(You might want to comment out DisplayAlerts=False if you want to see what's going on, but if you have a lot of text then switching off the display will speed up the process considerably.)

Golang example based on other comments on this gist: https://play.golang.org/p/B9VRe-L5lS3

When stripping nequdot from Torah passages (and essentially trying to modernize the spelling for myself), I realized that modern Hebrew actually writes in more vav's (and maybe yud's too). So I wrote this variation that checks to see if the o / u sound is represented before deleting one of its various representations. If it isn't represented, I ADD a vav.

`function stripVowels(rawString){
var newString = '';
for(j=0; j<rawString.length; j++) {
//If it has an O that isn't otherwise represented, then add a vav
if(rawString.charCodeAt(j) == 1465 && rawString[j+1] != "ו" && rawString[j+1] != "א" && rawString[j+1] != "ה"){
newString += "ו";
}
//If it has a U, also add a vav
else if(rawString.charCodeAt(j) == 1467){
newString += "ו";
}
//Turn Hebrew hyphen into space
else if(rawString.charCodeAt(j) == 1470) newString += " ";
//Get rid of anything that's not a normal letter or punctuation
else if(rawString.charCodeAt(j)<1425 || rawString.charCodeAt(j)>1479){
newString += rawString.charAt(j);
}
}
return(newString);
}

//O == 1465
//hyphen == 1470
//U == 1467`

Here's an example of the difference:

וְיִשְׂרָאֵל אָהַב אֶת־יֹוסֵף מִכָּל־בָּנָיו כִּי־בֶן־זְקֻנִים הוּא לֹו וְעָשָׂה לֹו כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים ׃
וישראל אהב את יוסף מכל בניו כי בן זקונים הוא לו ועשה לו כתונת פסים

I don't know why the code font didn't kick in.