Question

I’m trying to convert characters, like À, to their escaped form, such as \u00c0. I know this can be done with json_encode, but the function adds backslashes to special characters. (I’m not actually hoping to get a json object, just string conversion):

$str = 'À ß \ Ć " Ď < Ĕ';

For the string above, it’ll return

$str = '\u00c0 \u00df \\ \u0106 \" \u010e < \u0114';

and if I stripslashes, it will also strip the one before each uxxxx.

Is there a function for this particular conversion? Or what is the simplest way to do it?

Answer 1

$str = 'À ß \ Ć " Ď < Ĕ';

echo trim(preg_replace('/\\\\([^u])/', "$1", json_encode($str)), '"');
// ouptuts: \u00c0 \u00df \ \u0106 " \u010e < \u0114

I know it uses json_encode(), but it’s the easiest way to convert to \uXXXX