How to convert special characters in a string to unicode?

Question

I couldn't find an answer to this problem, having tried several answer here combined to find something that works, to no avail. An application I'm working on uses a users name to create PDF's with that name in it. However, when someones name contains a special character like "Yağmur" the pdf creator freaks out and omits this special character. However, when it gets the unicode equivalent ( "Yağmur" ), it prints "Yağmur" in the pdf as it should.

How do I check a name/string for any special character (regex = "[^a-z0-9 ]" ) and when found, replace that character with its unicode equivalent and returning the new unicoded string?

Answer 1

I will try to give the solution in generic way as the frame work you are using is not mentioned as the part of your problem statement.

I too faced the same kind of issue long time back. This should be handled by the pdf engine if you set the text/char encoding as UTF-8. Please find how you can set encoding in your framework for pdf generation and try it out. Hope it helps !!

Answer 2

One hackish way to do this would be as follows:

/*
 * TODO: poorly named 
 */ 
public static String convertUnicodePoints(String input) {
    // getting char array from input
    char[] chars =  input.toCharArray();
    // initializing output
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    // iterating input chars
    for (int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++) {
        // checking character code point to infer whether "conversion" is required
        // here, picking an arbitrary code point 125 as boundary
        if (Character.codePointAt(input, i) < 125) {
            sb.append(chars[i]);
        }
        // need to "convert", code point > boundary
        else {
            // for hex representation: prepends as many 0s as required
            // to get a hex string of the char code point, 4 characters long
            // sb.append(String.format("&#xu%04X;", (int)chars[i]));

            // for decimal representation, which is what you want here
            sb.append(String.format("&#%d;", (int)chars[i]));
        }
    }
    return sb.toString();
}

If you execute: System.out.println(convertUnicodePoints("Yağmur")); ...

... you'll get: Yağmur .

Of course, you can play with the "conversion" logic and decide which ranges get converted.