Question

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How to get the character from unicode value in PHP?
PHP: Convert unicode codepoint to UTF-8

How can I convert a unicode character such as %u05E1 to a normal character via PHP?

The chr function not covering it and I am looking for something similar.

Answer 1

“%uXXXX” is a non-standard scheme for URL-encoding Unicode characters. Apparently it was proposed but never really used. As such, there’s hardly any standard function that can decode it into an actual UTF-8 sequence.

It’s not too difficult to do it yourself though:

$string = '%u05E1%u05E2';
$string = preg_replace('/%u([0-9A-F]+)/', '&#x$1;', $string);
echo html_entity_decode($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');

This converts the %uXXXX notation to HTML entity notation &#xXXXX;, which can be decoded to actual UTF-8 by html_entity_decode. The above outputs the characters “סע” in UTF-8 encoding.