I'm using PHP for this web development project. Right now, I'm working on a user page, where the user can add words that he knows. Off course, I'm starting out crude, without adding any special features yet like Do you know this Character suggestion, etc.
I have tackled the challenges of adding UTF-16 collation and charset set to UTF-16 in my MySQL Database, in fact online at http://freemysqlhosting.net to support Chinese characters in my website. Now what I'm struggling with is to support automatic PinYin generation for my Chinese characters.
I have found this after searching all over SO: https://github.com/reorx/pinyindep/blob/master/Uni2Pinyin. Each line begins with a Chinese character, in UTF-16 Code Units.
Take for example, 爱. In UTF-16, it is 7231. I convert this at https://r12a.github.io/apps/conversion/. When I do a lookup in the file, I get the pinyin associated. :D This is the functionality I need, though looking it up in GitHub is in JS, rather than PHP.
In the manual lookup, ai4 is returned, which is the correct intonation. Now, what I'm looking for is either a PHP Built-in Library, or a code snippet to convert this string input, let's say “爱” into a UTF-16 Four Character Code Unit, such as here 7321.
How should I convert a Chinese character, in form of a string, to UTF-16 code units? (Either through built-in library, or through a suggested PHP Code Snippet)
P.S. I don't really like third-party tools unless they are really popular worldwide, or there's no other option.
You need to use PHP's multibyte string module:
$c = "爱";
list(, $d) = unpack('N', mb_convert_encoding($c, 'UCS-4BE', 'UTF-8'));
echo dechex($d);
// => 7231
Change UTF-8 to UTF-16 if your string is coming from the database in that encoding.
mb_convert_encoding will change the string into four-byte-per-character encoding; then unpack converts the four bytes into an unsigned long; finally, converting to hexadecimal string using dechex.