ASCIIPA-2

A markup language, using a subset of ASCII, that compiles to IPA. Design goals:

• It uses no delimiters besides (). It does use backslashes, but only as an escape character for literals. It does not use $ or |, on account of them not being found on all keyboards. It leaves single hyphens and hashes alone, because they are often used in glossing and sound change notation respectively. (Literal underscores must be typed as __.)
• If an ASCII character is already in IPA, or close to it (e.g. exists as a small capital character), then it will represent that IPA character. E, O, and Z from X-SAMPA are also present.
• Otherwise, the ASCII character or multigraph most similar visually to the IPA character in question will be used. For example, the clicks ǀ, ǁ, and ǂ are represented by --, ==, and ++ respectively.
• It prefers simple, alphanumeric multigraphs to weird combinations of symbols or unintuitive capitalized letters. For example, ɸ, β, θ, and ð are represented by ph, bh, th, and dh respectively.
• If a colloquial ASCII rendering of a sound already exists, it will try to use that. For example, ɬ is represented by &, as in colloquial Inuktitut romanization, and ʕ is represented by 3, as in the Arabic chat alphabet.

The following ASCII characters don't appear in it at all: /'"`[]{}$|.

Example usage:

>>> import asciipa2
>>> asciipa2.compile('dh0(:+rh)..:(13531)')
'ð̥̟̈˞ʰʼː˩˧˥˧˩'