Hello fellow Monks,

I am trying to convert an Chinese string to hexadecimal (final form) and vise versa, but I wanted also to see the in between steps.

I tried successfully to convert the string to utf-8 and then I was thinking of converting it into ascii characters and then to hex with the help of String::HexConvert. If that would work I would revert the process to the original form.

I manage to accomplish my task for utf-8 and UCS-2 encoding. I though of sharing the script, since I was not able to find further information online.

Similar question (How do I convert a sequence of hexes (D0 D6) to Chinese characters (中)?). I used the following modules (Text::Unidecode) and also (String::HexConvert).

Sample of code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use utf8;
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use Text::Unidecode;
use Encode qw(decode encode);
use String::HexConvert ':all';

binmode( STDOUT, ':utf8' );
my $Chinese = '北亰'; # Chinese characters for Bei Jing (U+5317 U+4EB0)

say 'UTF-8';
my $utf8 = encode( 'UTF-8', $Chinese );

my $ascii2hexUTF8 = ascii_to_hex($utf8);
say join(' ', split(/(..)/, $ascii2hexUTF8));

my $hex2ascciiUTF8 = hex_to_ascii($ascii2hexUTF8);

my $strUTF8 = decode( 'UTF-8', $hex2ascciiUTF8);
say $strUTF8;
say unidecode( $strUTF8 );

say '';

say 'UCS-2';
my $ucs2 = encode("UCS-2BE", $Chinese);

my $ascii2hexUCS2 = ascii_to_hex($ucs2);
say join(' ', split(/(..)/, $ascii2hexUCS2));

my $hex2ascciiUCS2 = hex_to_ascii($ascii2hexUCS2);

my $strUCS2 = decode("UCS-2BE", $hex2ascciiUCS2);
say $strUCS2;
say unidecode( $strUCS2 );

__END__

$ perl chinese.pl
UTF-8
 e5  8c  97  e4  ba  b0
北亰
Bei Jing

UCS-2
 53  17  4e  b0
北亰
Bei Jing

Hope this helps someone else as it did to me, BR.