Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Hopefully Michael Kaplan will step in here and explain some edge case or just a general comment like "that's totally wrong, Scott" - but until he does:

A fellow emailed me this question:

I want to convert a string representation of a Unicode character back into a 'char' in .NET C#.  Can you help?
 
i.e."U+0041" which is Hexidecimal for 65 which is ASCII for "A"
 
There's got to be a built in function(s) for this, and I just can't seem to find them?
 
To give you an idea, the pseudocode would be something like:
 
string s = "U+0041";
char c = new ?Unicode.Decoder.Decode?(s);
textBox1.Text = c.ToString();

Now, I have no idea why this gentleman would want to do this, but it's interesting enough. Here's what I came up with. I'm sure there's a better way.

//Just a reminder that you can use \u to escape Unicode in C#
char c = '\u0063';
Console.WriteLine(c.ToString());

//Here's how you'd go from a string to stuff like
// U+0053 U+0063 U+006f
string scott = "Scott and the letter c";
foreach(char s in scott)
{
	Console.Write("U+{0:x4} ",(int)s);
}
		
//Here's how converted a string (assuming it starts with U+)
// containing the representation of a char
// back to a char
// Is there a built in, or cleaner way? Would this work in Chinese?
string maybeC = "U+0063";
int p = int.Parse(maybeC.Substring(2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);
Console.WriteLine((char)p);

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