# Unicode escaping fun & games

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unicode-escaping-fun-games/166304>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [April 23, 2009, 6:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unicode-escaping-fun-games/166304 "2009-04-23T18:20:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Andrew\_SSTownley](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/d07c76/32.png) [@Andrew\_SSTownley](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Andrew_SSTownley)\
**Post date:** [April 23, 2009, 6:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/unicode-escaping-fun-games/166304/1 "2009-04-23T18:20:38Z")

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Hi folks,

After my last question, I finally sat down and figured out how to easily  
do the kinds of conversions I wanted (at least the Unicode UTF-8 part).  
Here’s what I came up with in the event that it may be useful to others  
having to exchange encoded 7-bit data across environments.

excalibur$ cat utf8.rb

# Created: Thu Apr 23 17:03:23 IST 2009

# 

# This is some quick code to deal with UTF-8 manipulation and

# serialization of 7-bit ASCII representations.

$KCODE=‘u’  
require ‘jcode’

def utf8\_escape(str)  
s = “”  
str.each\_char do |c|  
x = c.unpack(“C”)[0]  
if x \< 128  
s \<\< c  
else  
s \<\< “\u%04x” % c.unpack(“U”)[0]  
end  
end  
s  
end

def utf8\_unpack(str)  
str.gsub(/\u([0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F])/) do  
[$1.hex].pack(“U\*”)  
end  
end

Running it:

excalibur$ irb  
irb(main):001:0\> require ‘utf8’  
=\> true  
irb(main):002:0\> s = “Hello €!”  
=\> “Hello €!”  
irb(main):003:0\> t = utf8\_escape(s)  
=\> “Hello \u20ac!”  
irb(main):004:0\> u = utf8\_unpack(t)  
=\> “Hello €!”  
irb(main):005:0\> s == u  
=\> true

excalibur$ irb  
irb(main):001:0\> s = "à cA绋féà "  
=\> “\303\240cA\347\273\213f\303\251\303\240”  
irb(main):002:0\> require ‘utf8’  
=\> true  
irb(main):003:0\> s = "à cA绋féà "  
=\> "à cA绋féà "  
irb(main):004:0\> t = utf8\_escape(s)  
=\> “\u00e0cA\u7ecbf\u00e9\u00e0”  
irb(main):005:0\> u = utf8\_unpack(t)  
=\> "à cA绋féà "  
irb(main):006:0\> s == u  
=\> true

It may not be 100% bullet-proof, but it works for some simple examples  
that I could find, so this may be as far as I need to go with that part.  
The next step is to roll this into a one-pass string escaping routine so  
you don’t need to do a bunch of gsub calls.

Any suggestions, comments and improvements are welcome.

Cheers,

ast