From a scripting language (Python or Ruby, say) on a Debian-based system, I would like to find either one of:
I've recently listed the mapping from unicode codepoints to glypths in a TTF using TTX/FontTools. That tool is written in Python, so it matches the Python tag in your post. The command
ttx -t cmap foo.ttf
will generate an XML file foo.ttx
which describes that mapping, for various environments and encodings. See e.g. this reference for a description of what the platform and encoding identifiers actually mean. I assume that the package can be used as a library as well as a command line tool, but I have no experience there.