Perl Unicode Cookbook: Characters and Their Numbers

Apr 9, 2012 by Tom Christiansen

℞ 4: Characters and their numbers

Do you need to translate a codepoint to a character or a character to its codepoint? The ord and chr functions work transparently on all codepoints, not just on ASCII alone—nor in fact, not even just on Unicode alone.

 # ASCII characters
 ord("A")
 chr(65)

 # characters from the Basic Multilingual Plane
 ord("Σ")
 chr(0x3A3)

 # beyond the BMP
 ord("𝑛")               # MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL N
 chr(0x1D45B)

 # beyond Unicode! (up to MAXINT)
 ord("\x{20_0000}")
 chr(0x20_0000)

(Remember to enable the standard Perl Unicode preamble to use UTF-8 in literal strings in your source code and to encode output properly.)

Previous: ℞ 3: Enable UTF-8 Literals

Series Index: The Standard Preamble

Next: ℞ 5: Unicode Literals by Number