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

This is an example of using Plane 1, the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP):

string single_character = "\U00013000"; //first Egyptian ancient hieroglyph in hex
//it is encoded as 4 bytes (instead of 2)

//get the Unicode index using UTF32 (4 bytes fixed encoding)
Encoding enc = new UTF32Encoding(false, true, true);
byte[] b = enc.GetBytes(single_character);
Int32 code = BitConverter.ToInt32(b, 0); //in decimal