Unicode seems to identify characters as numeric code points. Not all code points actually refer to characters, however, because Unicode has the concept of combining characters (which I don’t know much about). However, each Unicode string, even some invalid ones (e.g., illegal sequence of combining characters), can be thought of as a list of code points (numbers).
In the UTF-16 encoding, each code point is encoded as a 2 or 4 byte sequence. In .net, Char might roughly correspond to either a 2 byte UTF-16 sequence or half of a 4 byte UTF-16 sequence. When Char contains half of a 4 byte sequence, it is considered a “surrogate” because it only has meaning when combined with another Char which it must be kept with. To get started with inspecting your .net string, you can get .net to tell you the code points contained in the string, automatically combining surrogate pairs together if necessary. .net provides Char.ConvertToUtf32 which is described the following way:
Converts the value of a UTF-16 encoded character or surrogate pair at a specified position in a string into a Unicode code point.
The documentation for Char.ConvertToUtf32(String s, Int32 index) states that an ArgumentException is thrown for the following case:
The specified index position contains a surrogate pair, and either the first character in the pair is not a valid high surrogate or the second character in the pair is not a valid low surrogate.
Thus, you can go character by character in a string and find all of the Unicode code points with the help of Char.IsHighSurrogate() and Char.ConvertToUtf32(). When you don’t encounter a high surrogate, the current character fits in one Char and you only need to advance one Char in your string. If you do encounter a high surrogate, the character requires two Char and you need to advance by two:
static IEnumerable<int> GetCodePoints(string s)
{
for (var i = 0; i < s.Length; i += char.IsHighSurrogate(s[i]) ? 2 : 1)
{
yield return char.ConvertToUtf32(s, i);
}
}
When you say “from a UTF-16 String”, that might imply that you have read in a series of bytes formatted as UTF-16. If that is the case, you would need to convert that to a .net string before passing to the above method:
GetCodePoints(Encoding.UTF16.GetString(myUtf16Blob));
Another note: depending on how you build your String instance, it is possible that it contains an illegal sequence of Char with regards to surrogate pairs. For such strings, Char.ConvertToUtf32() will throw an exception when encountered. However, I think that Encoding.GetString() will always either return a valid string or throw an exception. So, generally, as long as your String instances are from “good” sources, you needn’t worry about Char.ConvertToUtf32() throwing (unless you pass in random values for the index offset because your offset might be in the middle of a surrogate pair).
