Is there an easier way to convert an int to unicode?

Question

I'm currently doing a big switch statement in my javascript to convert

            case 176: char = '\u00B0'; break;
            case 177: char = '\u00B1'; break;
            case 178: char = '\u00B2'; break;
            case 179: char = '\u00B3'; break;
            case 180: char = '\u00B4'; break;

Answer 1

if your variable is named intVar you could use ...

var stringVar = String.fromCharCode(intVar);

... to get the unicode character.

Answer 2

JavaScript uses UCS-2 internally.

Thus, String.fromCharCode(intVar) won’t work for supplementary Unicode characters. If intVar is 119558 (0x1D306, for the '' character), for example.

If you want to create a string based on a non-BMP Unicode code point, you could use Punycode.js’s utility functions to convert between UCS-2 strings and UTF-16 code points:

// `String.fromCharCode` replacement that doesn’t make you enter the surrogate halves separately
punycode.ucs2.encode([0x1d306]); // ''
punycode.ucs2.encode([119558]); // ''
punycode.ucs2.encode([97, 98, 99]); // 'abc'

Answer 3

You can use String.fromCharCode(i). Note that arguments are expected to be UTF-16 encoded values. See ECMA-262 chapter 15.5.3.2 for details.