RSS Feed
Download our iPhone app
Browse DevX
Sign up for e-mail newsletters from DevX

Tip of the Day
Sep 16, 2019

Syntax for Unicode Escapes in Java

In addition to the string and character escape sequences, Java has a more general Unicode escaping mechanism, as defined in JLS 3.3. Unicode Escapes. A Unicode escape has the following syntax:

'\' 'u' < hex-digit> < hex-digit> < hex-digit> < hex-digit>

Where <hex-digit> is one of '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F'.

A Unicode escape is mapped by the Java compiler to a character (strictly speaking a 16-bit Unicode code unit) and can be used anywhere in the source code where the mapped character is valid. It is commonly used in character and string literals when you need to represent a non-ASCII character in a literal.

Octavia Anghel
Close Icon