How would you get an array of Unicode code points a .NET String?

Question

BACKSTORY: I have a list of character range restrictions that I need to check a string against, but the char type in .NET is UTF-16 and therefore some characters become wacky (surrogate) pairs instead. Thus when enumerating all the char's in a string, I don't get the 32-bit Unicode code points and some comparisons with high values fail.

I understand Unicode well enough that I could parse the bytes myself if necessary, but I'm looking for a C#/.NET Framework BCL solution. So ...

How would you convert a string to an array (int[]) of 32-bit Unicode code points?

Answer 1

static int[] ExtractScalars(string s)
{
  List<int> chars = new List<int>((s.Length * 3) / 2);

  var ee = StringInfo.GetTextElementEnumerator(s);

  while (ee.MoveNext())
  {
    string e = ee.GetTextElement();
    chars.Add(char.ConvertToUtf32(e, 0));
  }

  return chars.ToArray();
}