Question

I have a data file (an Apple plist, to be exact), that has Unicode codepoints like \U00e8 and \U2019. I need to turn these into valid hexadecimal HTML entities using PHP.

What I’m doing right now is a long string of:

 $fileContents = str_replace("\U00e8", "è", $fileContents);
 $fileContents = str_replace("\U2019", "’", $fileContents);

Which is clearly dreadful. I could use a regular expression to convert the \U and all trailing 0s to &#x, then stick on the trailing ;, but that also seems heavy-handed.

Is there a clean, simple way to take a string, and replace all the unicode codepoints to HTML entities?

Answer 1

You can use preg_replace:

preg_replace('/\\\\U0*([0-9a-fA-F]{1,5})/', '&#x\1;', $fileContents);

Testing the RE:

PS> 'some \U00e8 string with \U2019 embedded Unicode' -replace '\\U0*([0-9a-f]{1,5})','&#x$1;'
some è string with ’ embedded Unicode