How do you print raw UTF-8 characters from their numbers? [PHP]

Question

Say I wanted to print a ÿ (latin small y with diaeresis) from its Unicode/UTF-8 number of U+00FF or hex of c3 bf. How can I do that in PHP?

The reason is that I need to be able to create certain UTF-8 Characters is for testing in my regex and string functions. However, since I have less than 200 keys on my keyboard I can't type them - and since many times I am stuck in an ASCII only world - I need to be able to create them bases solely off of their ASCII safe, UTF-8 character code.

Note: In order for it show correctly in a browser I know that the first step is

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Answer 1

PHP sucks at Unicode. utf8_encode() only converts from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. And because your character ÿ = "U+00FF" happens to be one the first 256 codepoints in Unicode (U+0000 to U+00FF) and because Unicode decided that that range was to be coincident with the ISO-8859-1 encoding, you can (in this case!) write a literal ISO-8859-1 string using that hexadecimal number and convert to UTF-8.

<?php
        $x = utf8_encode("\xff");
        print $x;
?>

This works. But, besides sucking badly, this does not apply for Unicode chars not included in ISO-8859-1.

Answer 2

well you have everything you need.
Hex values being recognized in double-quoted strings as well

echo "\xc3\xbf";