Monks-

I am parsing the changes to Unihan in Unicode 3.1 Update-1.
I need to generate output in the form \0xE4\0xB8\0xAD

This is the UTF8 value for the Unicode character whose UTF16
value is U+4E2D. (In this case, the Chinese glyph "zhong1", middle.)

My code looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $utf16 = pack('U',hex(shift));
my $utf8;
print("Before echo, length of $utf16: ", length $utf16, "\n");
chomp($utf16 = `echo $utf16`);
print("After echo, ength of $utf16: ", length $utf16, "\n");
$utf8 .= sprintf("\\0x%x",ord($_)) foreach(split(/|/,$utf16));

print("$utf8\n");

exit;
[download]

What's nice is that I can use pack('U',$foo) to avoid having
to write a bit-shift sub to convert from UTF16 to UTF8.
It's a bit clumsy, though, in that it uses a system `echo`
to turn the packed UTF16 into an unpacked UTF16. (The two
length prints in the code.)

My question: how do I replace the `echo` with Perl without
reversing the UTF16 -> UTF8 conversion?

Thanks - Belden