This has just taken me a suprisingly long time to work out ...
I needed to output a file with the follwing as a marker in various places.
♦ U+2666 BLACK DIAMOND SUIT
General Character Properties
Unicode category: Symbol, Other
Various Useful Representations
UTF-8: 0xE2 0x99 0xA6
UTF-16: 0x2666C octal escaped UTF-8: \342\231\246
XML decimal entity: ♦
OK so I know the hex code I think I'll just use chr() but no... this only works for ASCII...
...and the mbstring functions are great for working with multi-byte strings but don't help enter them
It turns out that you can either copy a literal ♦ into your source code - or use the pack() function
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8');
echo "♦\n";
echo pack("ccc", 0xE2, 0x99, 0xA6) ."\n";
?>
Comments
I ran into the same issue
I ran into the same issue and this hint saved me hours. The PHP pack() function is not explained very well for those who haven't had to bother with binary strings and don't have a Perl background with the pack() function - you'll see numerous references to Perl in the documentation for pack()
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