CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unicodepowershell
Chuck Heatherly
Chuck Heatherly

Reputation: 1176

How to encode 32-bit Unicode characters in a PowerShell string literal?

This Stack Overflow question deals with 16-bit Unicode characters. I would like a similar solution that supports 32-bit characters. See this link for a listing of the various Unicode charts. For example, a range of characters that are 32-bit are the Musical Symbols.

The answer in the question linked above doesn't work because it casts the System.Int32 value as a System.Char, which is a 16-bit type.

Edit: Let me clarify that I don't particularly care about displaying the 32-bit Unicode character, I just want to store the character in a string variable.

Edit #2: I wrote a PowerShell snippet that uses the info in the marked answer and its comments. I would have wanted to put this in another comment, but comments can't be multi-line.

$inputValue = '1D11E'
$hexValue = [int]"0x$inputValue" - 0x10000
$highSurrogate = [int]($hexValue / 0x400) + 0xD800
$lowSurrogate = $hexValue % 0x400 + 0xDC00
$stringValue = [char]$highSurrogate + [char]$lowSurrogate

Dour High Arch still deserves credit for the answer for helping me finally understand surrogate pairs.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 5435

Answers (3)

Darin
Darin

Reputation: 2368

FYI: If anyone wants to store surrogate pairs in a Case Sensitive HashTable, this seems to work:

$NCRs = new-object System.Collections.Hashtable
$NCRs['Yopf'] = [string]::new(([char]0xD835, [char]0xDD50))
$NCRs['yopf'] = [string]::new(([char]0xD835, [char]0xDD6A))
$NCRs['Yopf']
$NCRs['yopf']

Outputs:

𝕐
𝕪

Upvotes: 0

mnaoumov
mnaoumov

Reputation: 2227

IMHO, the most elegant way to use Unicode literals in PowerShell is

[char]::ConvertFromUtf32(0x1D11E)

See my blogpost for more details

Upvotes: 7

Dour High Arch
Dour High Arch

Reputation: 21711

Assuming PowerShell uses UTF-16, 32-bit code points are represented as surrogates. For example, U+10000 is represented as:

0xD100 0xDC00

That is, two 16-bit chars; hex D100 and DC00.

Good luck finding a font with surrogate chars.

Upvotes: 2

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