Java: Convert String “\uFFFF” into char

Question

Is there a standard method to convert a string like \"\\uFFFF\" into character meaning that the string of six character contains a presentation of one unicode character?

Answer 1

char c = "\uFFFF".toCharArray()[0];

The value is directly interpreted as the desired string, and the whole sequence is realized as a single character.

Another way, if you are going to hard-code the value:

char c = '\uFFFF';

Note that \uFFFF doesn't seem to be a proper unicode character, but try with \u041f for example.

Read about unicode escapes here

Answer 2

String charInUnicode = "\\u0041"; // ascii code 65, the letter 'A'
Integer code = Integer.parseInt(charInUnicode.substring(2), 16); // the integer 65 in base 10
char ch = Character.toChars(code)[0]; // the letter 'A'

Answer 3

The backslash is escaped here (so you see two of them but the s String is really only 6 characters long). If you're sure that you have exactly "\u" at the beginning of your string, simply skip them and converter the hexadecimal value:

String s = "\\u20ac";

char c = (char) Integer.parseInt( s.substring(2), 16 );

After that c shall contain the euro symbol as expected.

Answer 4

If you are parsing input with Java style escaped characters you might want to have a look at StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava. It handles Unicode escapes as well as newlines, tabs etc.

String s = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava("\\u20ac\\n"); // s contains the euro symbol followed by newline