How do i get the decimal value of a unicode character in C#?

Question

How do i get the numeric value of a unicode character in C#?

For example if tamil character அ (U+0B85) given, output should be 2949 (i.e. <

Answer 1

How do i get the numeric value of a unicode character in C#?

A char is not necessarily the whole Unicode code point. In UTF-16 encoded languages such as C#, you may actually need 2 chars to represent a single "logical" character. And your string lengths migh not be what you expect - the MSDN documnetation for String.Length Property says:

"The Length property returns the number of Char objects in this instance, not the number of Unicode characters."

• So, if your Unicode character is encoded in just one char, it is already numeric (essentially an unsigned 16-bit integer). You may want to cast it to some of the integer types, but this won't change the actual bits that were originally present in the char.

• If your Unicode character is 2 chars, you'll need to multiply one by 2^16 and add it to the other, resulting in a uint numeric value:

  char c1 = ...;
  char c2 = ...;
  uint c = ((uint)c1 << 16) | c2;

How do i get the decimal value of a unicode character in C#?

When you say "decimal", this usually means a character string containing only characters that a human being would interpret as decimal digits.

• If you can represent your Unicode character by only one char, you can convert it to decimal string simply by:

  char c = 'அ';
  string s = ((ushort)c).ToString();

• If you have 2 chars for your Unicode character, convert them to a uint as described above, then call uint.ToString.

--- EDIT ---

AFAIK diacritical marks are considered separate "characters" (and separate code points) despite being visually rendered together with the "base" character. Each of these code points taken alone is still at most 2 UTF-16 code units.

BTW I think the proper name for what you are talking about is not "character" but "combining character". So yes, a single combining character can have more than 1 code point and therefore more than 2 code units. If you want a decimal representation of such as combining character, you can probably do it most easily through BigInteger:

string c = "\x0072\x0338\x0327\x0316\x0317\x0300\x0301\x0302\x0308\x0360";
string s = (new BigInteger(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(c))).ToString();

Depending on what order of significance of the code unit "digits" you wish, you may want reverse the c.