How to display indirectly given unicode character in Swift?

Question

In a JSON data file, I have a unicode character like this:

{
    ”myUnicodeCharacter”: ”\\\\u{25a1}”
}

I know how to read data from JSON fi

Answer 1

A better way would be to use the proper \uNNNN escape sequence for Unicode characters in JSON (see http://json.org for details). This is automatically handled by NSJSONSerialization, and you don't have to convert a hex code.

In your case the JSON data should be

{
    "myUnicodeCharacter" : "\u25a1"
}

Here is a full self-contained example:

let jsonString = "{ \"myUnicodeCharacter\" : \"\\u25a1\"}"
println(jsonString)
// { "myUnicodeCharacter" : "\u25a1"}

let dict = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(jsonString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)!,
            options: nil, error: nil) as [String : String]

let myUnicodeCharacterString = dict["myUnicodeCharacter"]!
println(myUnicodeCharacterString)
// □

Answer 2

I came up with a solution, which does not answer the question, but is actually a better way of doing what I'm trying to do.

The unicode character is given instead as its hexadecimal value in the JSON data file, stripping all escape characters:

{
    ”myUnicodeCharacter”: ”25a1”
}

Then it's processed like this, after reading the value in to myUnicodeCharacterString:

let num = Int(strtoul(myUnicodeCharacterString, nil, 16))
mySKLabelNode.Text = String(UnicodeScalar(num))

And that worked. Now the hollow square showed up.