Replacing unicode character literals with characters.

Question

Hi, say i have a String like:
String example = "\\u1234 llamas \\uabcd\\c0d4";etc.
How would I replace all the unicode literals (\\u1234 etc.) with the actual characters?
Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

sabre150 wrote:
It is interesting that every time I post my solution to this problem it is ignored. OK, it does require a third party component and it does use a regex but it does work. All one has to do is to construct a UnicodeRewriter and then useIt does involve adding a about 50 lines of code or more for what ought to be quite a trivial operation. And if you don't need a Rewriter for anything else that's an overhead, even if you just copy and past it.
This rather relates to a discussion I initiated last month, how good a reason do you need to import 3rd party libraries. Tastes vary
How about:
byte[] bytes = ("X=" + originalString + "\n").getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
InputStream bis = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes);
Properties p = new Properties();
p.load(bis);
String result = bis.getProperty("X");That's less code than your subclass alone, let alone the rewriter. OK it's a bit weird and not totally bulletproof should, say, newlines find their way into your input stream.
Also it uses an "official" interpreter of escaped Java strings rather than making one up.
Edited by: malcolmmc on Jul 11, 2009 8:53 AM