Nicknames and Unicode

A good friend of mine on the IRC channels recently gave me a special nickname – U+0E5B. What the heck is that you say? well it is the unicode character for “THAI CHARACTER KHOMUT”… I can still feel your puzzlement. Here is what it looks like:
(image taken from here)

Rather beautiful isn’t it.

Anyway when I was given this name as a nickname I was curious what it looked like (this was before I got to see the image provided above) but I hadn’t a clue how to convert the unicode codepoint to a character I could see on a page (yes i am unicode ignorant in oh so many ways).

Do some investigating and learn to change the “U+” to “&#” add a “x” to mark it as a hex and add a semicolan at the end and walla… the HTML entity. Does this work for every unicode codepoint – no clue – but it did for the ones I played with.

My page to see what it looked like (with an extra unicode character for fun):
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< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

๛ ☠

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