Question

I’ve been searching my !!! off trying to find a PHP function to convert UTF8 to the equivalent number. I’m not entirely sure what to call the number (I heard its called an ordinate?) but heres an example: http://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/3040-309F

Basically I’m trying to read a UTF-8 .txt file in PHP and then save every line in an array, so I can mess around with it.

If anyone can assist me with this it would be highly appreciated, as I am not that familiar with UTF8 yet.

Edit:
This is what I’ve got so far:

echo "var TextCharacters = new Array();\n";

$LineArray = array();
$file_handle = fopen("lesson1.txt", "r");


while (!feof($file_handle)) 
{
  $line_of_text = fgets($file_handle);  
  array_push($LineArray, $line_of_text);
}

fclose($file_handle);

foreach($LineArray as $s)
{
    for($i = 0; $i < mb_strlen($s,"utf-8"); $i++)
    {
        $char = mb_substr($s, $i, 1, "utf-8");
        echo "alert(go(" . bin2hex(iconv('UTF-8', 'UCS-2', $char)) . "));";         
    }
}

Answer 1

What you’re looking for is the Unicode code point, i.e. the numeric identifier by which the character is known in the Unicode character table. The “cheapest” way to do this is through the UCS-2 character encoding, which maps 1:1 from bytes unto the Unicode code points:

echo bin2hex(iconv('UTF-8', 'UCS-2', 'あ'));
// 3042

Caveats: the returned code is always 4 hexadecimal digits long (which you may or may not like) and UCS-2 does not support characters higher than the BMP, i.e. higher than code point FFFF.