Question

I have the following string "\u3048\u3075\u3057\u3093". I got the string
from a web page as part of returned data in JSONP.

What is that? It looks like UTF8, but then should it look like "U+3048U+3075U+3057U+3093"?

What’s the meaning of the backslashes (\)?

How can I convert it to a human-readable form?

I’m looking to a solution with Ruby, but any explanation of what’s going on here is appreciated.

Answer 1

It is Unicode, but not in UTF-8, it is in UTF-16. You might ignore surrogate pairs and deem it as 4-digit hexadecimal code points of a Unicode code character.

Using Ruby 1.9:

require 'json'

puts JSON.parse("[\"\\u4e00\",\"\\u4e8c\"]")

Prints:

一
二