Writing source code in PHP without special characters

Question

Is There a way to print special characters in PHP using only source code with ascii characters?

For example, in javascript, we can use \u00e1 in the middle of text.
In Java we can use \u2202 for example.

And in PHP? How can I use it?

I don't want to include special chars in my source code.

Answer 1

I found 3 ways for this.

Php Documentation: http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#language.types.string.syntax.double

A good explanation in portuguese: https://pt.stackoverflow.com/questions/293500/escrevendo-c%C3%B3digo-em-php-sem-caracteres-especiais

Sintax added only in PHP7:

\u{[0-9A-Fa-f]+} 
the sequence of characters matching the regular expression is a Unicode codepoint.
which will be output to the string as that codepoint's UTF-8 representation

examples:

<?php
  echo "\u{00e1}\n";
  echo "\u{2202}\n";
  echo "\u{aa}\n";
  echo "\u{0000aa}\n"; 
  echo "\u{9999}\n";

---

Sintax for PHP7 and old PHP versions:

\x[0-9A-Fa-f]{1,2}
the sequence of characters matching the regular expression,
is a character in hexadecimal notation

examples:

<?php
  echo "\xc3\xa1\n";
  echo "\u{00e1}\n";

---

Using int to binary convertion functions:

<?php
  printf('%c%c', 0xC3, 0xA1);  
  echo chr(0xC3) . chr(0xA1);  

printf() Extended Unicode Characters?

http://phptester.net/