How to convert a unichar value to an NSString in Objective-C?

Question

I\'ve got an international character stored in a unichar variable. This character does not come from a file or url. The variable itself only stores an unsigned short(0xce91)

Answer 1

Since 0xce91 is in the UTF-8 format and %C expects it to be in UTF-16 a simple solution like the one above won't work. For stringWithFormat:@"%C" to work you need to input 0x391 which is the UTF-16 unicode.

In order to create a string from the UTF-8 encoded unichar you need to first split the unicode into it's octets and then use initWithBytes:length:encoding.

unichar utf8char = 0xce91; 
char chars[2];
int len = 1;

if (utf8char > 127) {
    chars[0] = (utf8char >> 8) & (1 << 8) - 1;
    chars[1] = utf8char & (1 << 8) - 1; 
    len = 2;
} else {
    chars[0] = utf8char;
}

NSString *string = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:chars
                                            length:len 
                                          encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];