How to enter a multibyte Unicode string in PHP

This has just taken me a surprisingly long time to work out …

I needed to output a file with the following as a marker in various places.

♦ U+2666 BLACK DIAMOND SUIT

General Character Properties

Unicode category: Symbol, Other

Various Useful Representations

UTF-8: 0xE2 0x99 0xA6 UTF-16: 0x2666

C octal escaped UTF-8: \342\231\246 XML decimal entity: ♦

OK so I know the hex code I think I’ll just use chr() but no… this only works for ASCII…

…and the mbstring functions are great for working with multi-byte strings but don’t help enter them

It turns out that you can either copy a literal ♦ into your source code - or use the pack() function

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8');
echo "♦\n";

echo pack("ccc", 0xE2, 0x99, 0xA6) ."\n";


?>