Swift Language Strings and Characters Unicode
Example
Setting values
Using Unicode directly
var str: String = "I want to visit 北京, Москва, मुंबई, القاهرة, and 서울시. 😊"
var character: Character = "🌍"
Using hexadecimal values
var str: String = "\u{61}\u{5927}\u{1F34E}\u{3C0}" // a大🍎π
var character: Character = "\u{65}\u{301}" // é = "e" + accent mark
Note that the Swift Character can be composed of multiple Unicode code points, but appears to be a single character. This is called an Extended Grapheme Cluster.
Conversions
String --> Hex
// Accesses views of different Unicode encodings of `str`
str.utf8
str.utf16
str.unicodeScalars // UTF-32
Hex --> String
let value0: UInt8 = 0x61
let value1: UInt16 = 0x5927
let value2: UInt32 = 0x1F34E
let string0 = String(UnicodeScalar(value0)) // a
let string1 = String(UnicodeScalar(value1)) // 大
let string2 = String(UnicodeScalar(value2)) // 🍎
// convert hex array to String
let myHexArray = [0x43, 0x61, 0x74, 0x203C, 0x1F431] // an Int array
var myString = ""
for hexValue in myHexArray {
myString.append(UnicodeScalar(hexValue))
}
print(myString) // Cat‼🐱
Note that for UTF-8 and UTF-16 the conversion is not always this easy because things like emoji cannot be encoded with a single UTF-16 value. It takes a surrogate pair.
