convert unicode into character with ruby

Question

I found a dictionary of Chinese characters in unicode. I'm trying to build a database of Characters out of this dictionary but I don't know how to convert unicode to a character..

p "国".unpack("U*").first #this gives the unicode 22269

How can convert 22269 back into the character value which would be the opposite of the line above.

Answer 1

Ruby 1.9 :

p "国".codepoints.first #=> 22269
p 22269.chr('UTF-8') #=> "国"

Answer 2

[22269].pack('U*') #=> "国" or "\345\233\275"

Edit: Works in 1.8.6+ (verified in 1.8.6, 1.8.7, and 1.9.2). In 1.8.x you get a three-byte string representing the single Unicode character, but using puts on that causes the correct Chinese character to appear in the terminal.