Characters → Unicode

This converter takes a string of characters and returns the Unicode codepoint for each character in several common formats: hexadecimal, decimal, JavaScript \u escapes, and HTML numeric character references.

Useful for debugging text encoding issues, escaping characters for source code, embedding special characters in HTML or JSON, and inspecting strings that contain combining marks or emoji.

Output formats

• Hex (U+XXXX): e.g. U+00E9 for "é".
• Decimal: e.g. 233 for "é".
• JavaScript escapes: \u00E9 or \u{1F600} for emoji.
• HTML numeric entities: é or é.

How it works

The browser exposes each character's Unicode codepoint via String.prototype.codePointAt. The converter iterates over the string and formats each codepoint in the chosen output format. It handles surrogate pairs correctly, so a single emoji renders as one codepoint (not two).

Worked example

Input: Café 😀

Output (hex):

• C → U+0043
• a → U+0061
• f → U+0066
• é → U+00E9
• (space) → U+0020
• 😀 → U+1F600

When this is useful

Debugging text that looks correct but does not match expected strings (often a hidden combining character or zero-width space), embedding non-ASCII characters in source code as escapes, and learning about Unicode by inspecting real text.

Combining characters and graphemes

Some visible "characters" (like an accented letter or a flag emoji) are actually composed of multiple codepoints joined by combining marks or zero-width joiners. This tool shows each underlying codepoint individually, which is usually what you want for debugging encoding issues.

Frequently asked questions

Related tools

• Unicode → Characters
• Regex Tester
• Data Storage