Unicode character in PHP string

This question looks embarrassingly simple, but I haven't been able to find an answer.

What is the PHP equivalent to the following C# line of code?

string str = "\u1000";

This sample creates a string with a single Unicode character whose "Unicode numeric value" is 1000 in hexadecimal (4096 in decimal).

That is, in PHP, how can I create a string with a single Unicode character whose "Unicode numeric value" is known?

Solution 1:

PHP 7.0.0 has introduced the "Unicode codepoint escape" syntax.

It's now possible to write Unicode characters easily by using a double-quoted or a heredoc string, without calling any function.

$unicodeChar = "\u{1000}";

Because JSON directly supports the \uxxxx syntax the first thing that comes into my mind is:

$unicodeChar = '\u1000';
echo json_decode('"'.$unicodeChar.'"');

Another option would be to use mb_convert_encoding()

echo mb_convert_encoding('&#x1000;', 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');

or make use of the direct mapping between UTF-16BE (big endian) and the Unicode codepoint:

echo mb_convert_encoding("\x10\x00", 'UTF-8', 'UTF-16BE');