How do you echo a 4-digit Unicode character in Bash

Question

I d like to add the Unicode skull and crossbones to my shell prompt  specifically the  SKULL AND CROSSBONES   U 2620    but I can t figure out the magic incantation to make echo spit it  or any other  4-digit Unicode character  Two-digit one s are easy  For example  echo -e   x55      In addition to the answers below it should be noted that  obviously  your terminal needs to support Unicode for the output to be what you expect  gnome-terminal does a good job of this  but it isn t necessarily turned on by default    On macOS s Terminal app Go to Preferences-  Encodings and choose Unicode  UTF-8

User · Answer

You may need to encode the code point as octal in order for prompt expansion to correctly decode it.

U+2620 encoded as UTF-8 is E2 98 A0.

So in Bash,

export PS1="\342\230\240"

will make your shell prompt into skull and bones.

User · Answer

Any of these three commands will print the character you want in a console  provided the console do accept UTF-8 characters  most current ones do    echo -e  SKULL AND CROSSBONES  U 2620   U02620  echo   SKULL AND CROSSBONES  U 2620   U02620  printf   b   SKULL AND CROSSBONES  U 2620   U02620 n   SKULL AND CROSSBONES  U 2620      After  you could copy and paste the actual glyph  image  character  to any  UTF-8 enabled  text editor   If you need to see how such Unicode Code Point is encoded in UTF-8  use xxd  much better hex viewer than od    echo    U 2620   U02620    xxd 0000000  2855 2b32 3632 3029 20e2 98a0 0a          U 2620        That means that the UTF8 encoding is  e2 98 a0   Or  in HEX to avoid errors  0xE2 0x98 0xA0  That is  the values between the space  HEX 20  and the Line-Feed  Hex 0A    If you want a deep dive into converting numbers to chars  look here to see an article from Greg s wiki  BashFAQ  about ASCII encoding in Bash

User · Answer

echo -e   u2620         u takes four hexadecimal digits     echo -e   U0001f602     U takes eight hexadecimal digits    This works in Zsh  I ve checked version 4 3  and in Bash 4 2 or newer

User · Answer

So long as your text-editors can cope with Unicode  presumably encoded in UTF-8  you can enter the Unicode code-point directly   For instance  in the Vim text-editor you would enter insert mode and press Ctrl   V   U and then the code-point number as a 4-digit hexadecimal number  pad with zeros if necessary   So you would type Ctrl   V   U 2 6 2 0  See  What is the easiest way to insert Unicode characters into a document   At a terminal running Bash you would type CTRL SHIFT U and type in the hexadecimal code-point of the character you want  During input your cursor should show an underlined u  The first non-digit you type ends input  and renders the character  So you could be able to print U 2620 in Bash using the following   echo CTRL SHIFT U2620ENTERENTER   The first enter ends Unicode input  and the second runs the echo command    Credit  Ask Ubuntu SE

User · Answer

Sorry for reviving this old question   But when using bash there is a very easy approach to create Unicode codepoints from plain ASCII input  which even does not fork at all   unicode     local -n a   1   local c  printf -vc    U 08x    2   printf -va   c     unicodes     local a c  for a  do printf -vc    U 08x    a   printf   c   done       Use it as follows to define certain codepoints  unicode crossbones 0x2620 echo   crossbones    or to dump the first 65536 unicode codepoints to stdout  takes less than 2s on my machine   The additional space is to prevent certain characters to flow into each other due to shell s monospace font    for a in  0  65535   do unicodes   a   printf      done   or to tell a little very typical parent s story  this needs Unicode 2010    unicodes 0x1F6BC 32 43 32 0x1F62D 32 32 43 32 0x1F37C 32 61 32 0x263A 32 32 43 32 0x1F4A9 10   Explanation    printf   UXXXXXXXX  prints out any Unicode character printf    U 08x  number prints  UXXXXXXXX with the number converted to Hex  this then is fed to another printf to actually print out the Unicode character printf recognizes octal  0oct   hex  0xHEX  and decimal  0 or numbers starting with 1 to 9  as numbers  so you can choose whichever representation fits best printf -v var    gathers the output of printf into a variable  without fork  which tremendously speeds up things  local variable is there to not pollute the global namespace local -n var other aliases var to other  such that assignment to var alters other   One interesting part here is  that var is part of the local namespace  while other is part of the global namespace    Please note that there is no such thing as local or global namespace in bash   Variables are kept in the environment  and such are always global   Local just puts away the current value and restores it when the function is left again   Other functions called from within the function with local will still see the  local  value   This is a fundamentally different concept than all the normal scoping rules found in other languages  and what bash does is very powerful but can lead to errors if you are a programmer who is not aware of that

User · Answer

In UTF-8 it s actually 6 digits  or 3 bytes      printf   xE2 x98 xA0      To check how it s encoded by the console  use hexdump     printf     hexdump 0000000 98e2 00a0                               0000003

User · Answer

Here s a fully internal Bash implementation  no forking  unlimited size of Unicode characters   fast chr         local   octal     local   char     printf -v   octal   03o   1     printf -v   char      octal     REPLY    char    function unichr       local c  1      Ordinal of char     local l 0      Byte ctr     local o 63      Ceiling     local p 128      Accum  bits     local s         Output string         c  lt  0x80     amp  amp    fast chr   c   echo -n   REPLY   return         while    c  gt  o     do         fast chr     t   0x80   c  amp  0x3f            s   REPLY s             c  gt  gt   6  l    p    o 1  o gt  gt  1        done      fast chr     t   p   c        echo -n   REPLY s        test harness for    i 0x2500  i lt 0x2600  i       do     unichr  i done   Output was   -                                               -        -                             -                           ------

User · Answer

Based on Stack Overflow questions Unix cut  remove first token and https   stackoverflow com a 15903654 781312    octal   echo -n     od -t o1   head -1   cut -d    -f2-   sed -e  s    0-9          0 1 g   echo Octal representation is following  octal echo -e   octal     Output is the following   Octal representation is following  0342 0230 0240

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If you don t mind a Perl one-liner     perl -CS -E  say   x 2620        -CS enables UTF-8 decoding on input and UTF-8 encoding on output  -E evaluates the next argument as Perl  with modern features like say enabled  If you don t want a newline at the end  use print instead of say

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Easy with a Python2 3 one-liner     python -c  print u  u2620        python2   python3 -c  print u  u2620       python3   Results in

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I m using this     echo -e   u2620      This is pretty easier than searching a hex representation    I m using this in my shell scripts  That works on gnome-term and urxvt AFAIK

User · Answer

If hex value of unicode character is known  H  2620  printf   b    u H    If the decimal value of a unicode character is known  declare -i U 2 4096 6 256 2 16 printf -vH   x   U                convert to hex printf   b    u H

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Here is a list of all unicode emoji s available   https   en wikipedia org wiki Emoji Unicode blocks  Example    echo -e   U1F304     For get the ASCII value of this character use hexdump  echo -e      hexdump -C  00000000  f0 9f 8c 84 0a                                            00000005   And then use the values informed in hex format  echo -e   xF0 x9F x8C x84 x0A

User · Answer

Quick one-liner to convert UTF-8 characters into their 3-byte format   var    echo -n       od -An -tx1    printf    x s    var     echo

User · Answer

The printf builtin  just as the coreutils  printf  knows the  u escape sequence which accepts 4-digit Unicode characters       uHHHH Unicode  ISO IEC 10646  character with hex value HHHH  4 digits    Test with Bash 4 2 37 1      printf   u2620 n

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In Bash   UnicodePointToUtf8         local x   1                  ok if  0x2620      x   x   u 0x                   u2620  - gt   0x2620      x   x U  0x   x   x u  0x     U-2620  - gt   0x2620      x    x     from hex to decimal     local y  x n 0        x -ge 0      return 1     while    y -gt 0    do y    y gt  gt 1    n    n 1    done     if    n -le 7    then         7         y  x     elif    n -le 11    then      5 6         y         x gt  gt  6  amp 0x1F  0xC0                       x amp 0x3F  0x80          elif    n -le 16    then      4 6 6         y         x gt  gt 12  amp 0x0F  0xE0                        x gt  gt  6  amp 0x3F  0x80                       x amp 0x3F  0x80         else                          3 6 6 6         y         x gt  gt 18  amp 0x07  0xF0                        x gt  gt 12  amp 0x3F  0x80                        x gt  gt  6  amp 0x3F  0x80                       x amp 0x3F  0x80         fi     printf -v y    x x   y     echo -n -e  y      test for    i 0x2500  i lt 0x2600  i       do     UnicodePointToUtf8  i            i 1  amp  0x1f        0      echo    done x  U 2620  echo   x - gt    UnicodePointToUtf8  x      Output   -                                              -       -                            -                           ------                                                                                                                                                                   U 2620 - gt

User · Answer

Just put     in your shell script  In the correct locale and on a Unicode-enabled console it ll print just fine     echo         An ugly  workaround  would be to output the UTF-8 sequence  but that also depends on the encoding used     echo -e   xE2 x98 xA0

User · Answer

In bash to print a Unicode character to output use  x  u or  U  first for 2 digit hex  second for 4 digit hex  third for any length   echo -e   U1f602    I you want to assign it to a variable use        syntax  x    U1f602  echo  x

[bash] How do you echo a 4-digit Unicode character in Bash?

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