Question

I have a chinese character set as a variable with character encoding as utf-8:

$a='列';

From this, how can I get the value ‘5217’ assigned to a string ($b) (possibly using UTF-16? but there might be a better way to do it)?

Codes:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/5217/index.htm

Answer 1

function unicode_decode($str) {
    return preg_replace_callback("/((?:[^\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7E]{3})+)/", "decode_callback", $str);
}

function decode_callback($matches) {
    $char = mb_convert_encoding($matches[1], "UTF-16", "UTF-8");
    $escaped = "";
    for ($i = 0, $l = strlen($char); $i < $l; $i += 2) {
       $escaped .=  "\u" . sprintf("%02x%02x", ord($char[$i]), ord($char[$i+1]));
    }
    return $escaped;
}

$a='列';
var_dump(unicode_decode($a));