Question

I have the following:

function showUnicode()
{
  var text = prompt( 'Enter the wanted text', 'Unicode' ),
      unicode = 0,
      ntext,
      temp,
      i = 0
  ;

  // got the text now transform it in unicode
  for(i; i < text.length; i++)
  {
    unicode += text.charCodeAt(i)

  }

  // now do an alert
  alert( 'Here is the unicode:\n' + unicode + '\nof:\n' + text )

}

Thanks for the idea to initialize unicode but now unicode variable gets the Unicode of the last character, why does it?

Answer 1

JavaScript uses UCS-2 internally.

This means that supplementary Unicode symbols are exposed as two separate code units (the surrogate halves). For example, ''.length == 2, even though it’s only one Unicode character.

Because of this, if you want to get the Unicode code point for every character in a string, you’ll need to convert the UCS-2 string into an array of UTF-16 code points (where each surrogate pair forms a single code point). You could use Punycode.js’s utility functions for this:

punycode.ucs2.decode('abc'); // [97, 98, 99]
punycode.ucs2.decode(''); // [119558]