Converting to unicode characters in Perl? - perl

Question

I want to convert the text ( Hindi ) to Unicode in Perl. I have searched in CPAN. But, I could not find the exact module/way which I am looking for. Basically, I am looking for something like this.
My Input is:
इस परीक्षण के लिए है
My expected output is:
\u0907\u0938\u0020\u092a\u0930\u0940\u0915\u094d\u0937\u0923\u0020\u0915\u0947\u0020\u0932\u093f\u090f\u0020\u0939\u0948
How to achieve this in Perl?
Give me some suggestions.

Answer 1

Try this
use utf8;
my $str = 'इस परीक्षण के लिए है';
for my $c (split //, $str) {
printf("\\u%04x", ord($c));
}
print "\n";

Answer 2

You don't really need any module to do that. ord for extracting char code and printf for formatting it as 4-numbers zero padded hex is more than enough:
use utf8;
my $str = 'इस परीक्षण के लिए है';
(my $u_encoded = $str) =~ s/(.)/sprintf "\\u%04x", ord($1)/sge;
# \u0907\u0938\u0020\u092a\u0930\u0940\u0915\u094d\u0937\u0923\u0020\u0915\u0947\u0020\u0932\u093f\u090f\u0020\u0939\u0948

Answer 3

Because I left a few comments on how the other answers might fall short of the expectations of various tools, I'd like to share a solution that encodes characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane as pairs of two escapes: "😃" would become \ud83d\ude03.
This is done by:
Encoding the string as UTF-16, without a byte order mark. We explicitly choose an endianess. Here, we arbitrarily use the big-endian form. This produces a string of octets (“bytes”), where two octets form one UTF-16 code unit, and two or four octets represent an Unicode code point.
This is done for convenience and performance; we could just as well determine the numeric values of the UTF-16 code units ourselves.
unpacking the resulting binary string into 16-bit integers which represent each UTF-16 code unit. We have to respect the correct endianess, so we use the n* pattern for unpack (i.e. 16-bit big endian unsigned integer).
Formatting each code unit as an \uxxxx escape.
As a Perl subroutine, this would look like
use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode ();
sub unicode_escape {
my ($str) = #_;
my $UTF_16BE_octets = Encode::encode("UTF-16BE", $str);
my #code_units = unpack "n*", $UTF_16BE_octets;
return join '', map { sprintf "\\u%04x", $_ } #code_units;
}
Test cases:
use Test::More tests => 3;
use utf8;
is unicode_escpape(''), '',
'empty string is empty string';
is unicode_escape("\N{SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH}"), '\ud83d\ude03',
'non-BMP code points are escaped as surrogate halves';
my $input = 'इस परीक्षण के लिए है';
my $output = '\u0907\u0938\u0020\u092a\u0930\u0940\u0915\u094d\u0937\u0923\u0020\u0915\u0947\u0020\u0932\u093f\u090f\u0020\u0939\u0948';
is unicode_escape($input), $output,
'ordinary BMP code points each have a single escape';

Answer 4

If you want only an simple converter, you can use the following filter
perl -CSDA -nle 'printf "\\u%*v04x\n", "\\u",$_'
#or
perl -CSDA -nlE 'printf "\\u%04x",$_ for unpack "U*"'
like:
echo "इस परीक्षण के लिए है" | perl -CSDA -ne 'printf "\\u%*v04x\n", "\\u",$_'
#or
perl -CSDA -ne 'printf "\\u%*v04x\n", "\\u",$_' <<< "इस परीक्षण के लिए है"
prints:
\u0907\u0938\u0020\u092a\u0930\u0940\u0915\u094d\u0937\u0923\u0020\u0915\u0947\u0020\u0932\u093f\u090f\u0020\u0939\u0948\u000a
Unicode with surrogate pairs.
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use open qw(:std :utf8);
my $str = "if( \N{U+1F42A}+\N{U+1F410} == \N{U+1F41B} ){ \N{U+1F602} = \N{U+1F52B} } # ορισμός ";
print "$str\n";
for my $ch (unpack "U*", $str) {
if( $ch > 0xffff ) {
my $h = ($ch - 0x10000) / 0x400 + 0xD800;
my $l = ($ch - 0x10000) % 0x400 + 0xDC00;
printf "\\u%04x\\u%04x", $h, $l;
}
else {
printf "\\u%04x", $ch;
}
}
print "\n";
prints
if( 🐪+🐐 == 🐛 ){ 😂 = 🔫 } # ορισμός
\u0069\u0066\u0028\u0020\ud83d\udc2a\u002b\ud83d\udc10\u0020\u003d\u003d\u0020\ud83d\udc1b\u0020\u0029\u007b\u0020\ud83d\ude02\u0020\u003d\u0020\ud83d\udd2b\u0020\u007d\u0020\u0023\u0020\u03bf\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03bc\u03cc\u03c2\u0020