blog/_posts/2013-11-06-unicode-codepoints-in-ruby.md

layout	title	date
post	Unicode codepoints in ruby	06.11.2013 12:04

Another post of the category "better write it down before you forget it".

I ❤ Unicode. Atleast most of the time. That's why I have things like ✓, ✗ and ツ mapped directly on my keyboard.

But sometimes you need not only the symbol itself, but maybe the codepoint as well. That's easy in ruby:

irb> "❤".codepoints
=> [10084]

Got some codepoints and need to map it back to it's symbol? Easy:

irb> [10084, 10003].pack("U*")
=> "❤✓"

Oh, of course the usual \uXYZ syntax works aswell, but you need the hexstring for that:

irb> 10084.to_s 16
=> "2764"
irb> "\u{2764}"
=> "❤"

Sometimes you may need to see the actual bytes. This is easy in ruby aswell:

irb> "❤".bytes
=> [226, 157, 164]

There is documentation on these things:

• each_codepoint
• codepoints
• bytes

Enjoy the world of unicode! ❤