I need to encode/convert a Unicode string to its escaped form, with backslashes. Anybody know how?
A unicode escape sequence is a backslash followed by the letter 'u' followed by four hexadecimal digits (0-9a-fA-F). It matches a character in the target sequence with the value specified by the four digits. For example, ”\u0041“ matches the target sequence ”A“ when the ASCII character encoding is used.
Regexp escape form : /a/ Regexp escape form : \\\*\? \{\}\.
Escapes start with a backslash followed by the hexadecimal number that represents the character's hexadecimal Unicode code point value. If there is a following character that is not in the range A–F, a–f or 0–9, that is all you need.
In Ruby 1.8.x, String#inspect may be what you are looking for, e.g.
>> multi_byte_str = "hello\330\271!"
=> "hello\330\271!"
>> multi_byte_str.inspect
=> "\"hello\\330\\271!\""
>> puts multi_byte_str.inspect
"hello\330\271!"
=> nil
In Ruby 1.9 if you want multi-byte characters to have their component bytes escaped, you might want to say something like:
>> multi_byte_str.bytes.to_a.map(&:chr).join.inspect
=> "\"hello\\xD8\\xB9!\""
In both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 if you are instead interested in the (escaped) unicode code points, you could do this (though it escapes printable stuff too):
>> multi_byte_str.unpack('U*').map{ |i| "\\u" + i.to_s(16).rjust(4, '0') }.join
=> "\\u0068\\u0065\\u006c\\u006c\\u006f\\u0639\\u0021"
To use a unicode character in Ruby use the "\uXXXX" escape; where XXXX is the UTF-16 codepoint. see http://leejava.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/unicode-escape-in-ruby/
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