How Can I Decode Unicode Escape Sequences to UTF-8 in PHP?

Decoding Unicode Escape Sequences to UTF-8 Characters in PHP

Question: Is there a built-in function in PHP that can decode Unicode escape sequences like "u00ed" into the corresponding UTF-8 character, such as "í"?

Answer: While PHP does not provide a direct function for this task, you can use a combination of regular expressions and character encoding functions to achieve the desired result:

$str = preg_replace_callback('/\\u([0-9a-fA-F]{4})/', function ($match) {
    return mb_convert_encoding(pack('H*', $match[1]), 'UTF-8', 'UCS-2BE');
}, $str);

This code uses a regular expression to match Unicode escape sequences and replaces them with their corresponding UTF-8 characters using mb_convert_encoding().

In case the escape sequence is in UTF-16 format:

$str = preg_replace_callback('/\\u([0-9a-fA-F]{4})/', function ($match) {
    return mb_convert_encoding(pack('H*', $match[1]), 'UTF-8', 'UTF-16BE');
}, $str);

This modified code assumes that the escape sequence is UTF-16 encoded, which is commonly used in certain programming languages and JSON notation.

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