How can I get a Unicode character's code?

character, java, unicode

Solution

Just convert it to `int`:

char registered = '®';
int code = (int) registered;

In fact there's an implicit conversion from `char` to `int` so you don't have to specify it explicitly as I've done above, but I would do so in this case to make it obvious what you're trying to do.

This will give the UTF-16 code unit - which is the same as the Unicode code point for any character defined in the Basic Multilingual Plane. (And only BMP characters can be represented as `char` values in Java.) As Andrzej Doyle's answer says, if you want the Unicode code point from an arbitrary string, use `Character.codePointAt()`.

Once you've got the UTF-16 code unit or Unicode code points, both of which are integers, it's up to you what you do with them. If you want a string representation, you need to decide exactly what kind of representation you want. (For example, if you know the value will always be in the BMP, you might want a fixed 4-digit hex representation prefixed with `U+`, e.g. `"U+0020"` for space.) That's beyond the scope of this question though, as we don't know what the requirements are.

Problem

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