CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascripthtmlascii
Zulu
Zulu

Reputation: 81

Store ASCII code into variable, then display

I'm currently using Visual Studio Community and learning Javascript/html5. I came across a problem where I'm trying to store a ASCII code in a variable using javascript, however, when I try to display it, it'll show the actual code instead of the intended character.

 <script type="text/javascript">

    x = "&#24171";

    function ranAlert(){
        alert(x);
    }
 </script>

 <form>
    <input type="button" value="me" onclick="ranAlert()" />

 </form>

The output here will show when I click on the button, "&#24171". But how would I get it to display the actual intended character "幫"?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1621

Answers (1)

Pointy
Pointy

Reputation: 413737

For your character, you need to use JavaScript notation and not HTML, because you're not using the string for any HTML markup; you're just passing it to alert():

alert("\u5e6b");

The JavaScript notation uses hex, so you'd need to translate 24171 to hex notation. You can do that in your browser console:

(24171).toString(16)

gives 5e6b.

Since this character can be represented with UTF-16, a simpler way to deal with the problem is to simply use the character directly in the string:

alert("幫");

For some Unicode codepoints, representation in JavaScript requires a pair of JavaScript characters, because JavaScript strings use UTF-16 encoding and some characters require more than 16 bits to represent. The extremely helpful website FileFormat.org has resources for Unicode, including ready-to-use representations for every character in several popular languages including JavaScript.

If you want to use that codepoint in CSS, say as the value of a content: property, you escape slightly differently. The CSS encoding scheme allows 6-hex-digit values:

.my-glyph { content: "\005E6B"; }

Finally note that using the term "character" is not entirely accurate, because Unicode reflects the fact that many writing systems involve glyphs composed from several parts. I'm not very strict on terminology in general so don't follow my example; it's important to keep in mind that what looks like a single glyph (what an alphabet-user would call a "character") may actually be made up of several separate codepoints.

Upvotes: 4

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