Creating Unicode character from its number

Question

I want to display a Unicode character in Java. If I do this, it works just fine:

String symbol = \"\\u2202\";

symbol is equal to \"∂\". That\'

Answer 1

Although this is an old question, there is a very easy way to do this in Java 11 which was released today: you can use a new overload of Character.toString():

public static String toString​(int codePoint)

Returns a String object representing the specified character (Unicode code point). The result is a string of length 1 or 2, consisting solely of the specified codePoint.

Parameters:
codePoint - the codePoint to be converted

Returns:
the string representation of the specified codePoint

Throws:
IllegalArgumentException - if the specified codePoint is not a valid Unicode code point.

Since:
11

Since this method supports any Unicode code point, the length of the returned String is not necessarily 1.

The code needed for the example given in the question is simply:

    int codePoint = '\u2202';
    String s = Character.toString(codePoint); // <<< Requires JDK 11 !!!
    System.out.println(s); // Prints ∂

This approach offers several advantages:

• It works for any Unicode code point rather than just those that can be handled using a char.
• It's concise, and it's easy to understand what the code is doing.
• It returns the value as a string rather than a char[], which is often what you want. The answer posted by McDowell is appropriate if you want the code point returned as char[].