Re: how do I expand a unicode string to its visual UTF8 representation?

On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:44:50 -0700, Andrew wrote:


Do you need to convert it to 7-bit ASCII? If you can use 8-bit chars,
converting to UTF-8 is probably easiest - you can use

byte[] bytes = str.getBytes("UTF-8");

to get the UTF-8 data to put in your database, and then use

String str = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

to convert the data you get from the database back into a Unicode string.
If you do decide to use the \u escape codes, you could do:

public class UnicodeTest {
     public UnicodeTest() {
     }

     public void doit() {
     StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
     builder.append("Copyright \u00A9 2009\n"); builder.append("Here is
the phrase (in Icelandic): I can eat glass and it doesn't hurt me\n");
     builder.append("\u00C9g get eti\u00F0 gler \u00E1n \u00FEess a\u00F0
mei\u00F0a mig");
     String str = builder.toString();

     System.out.println(str);

     for (char c : str.toCharArray() ) {
         if ((c & 0xFF80) == 0)
             System.out.print(c);
         else
             System.out.printf("\\u%04X",(short)c);
     }
}

     public static void main(String[] args) {
         UnicodeTest test = new UnicodeTest();
         test.doit();
     }
}

Writing a function to convert from the \u escape codes to a unicode
string is left as an exercise for the reader (this would be an advantage
of using UTF-8 - you don't have to write your own decoder).