Escape multibyte characters

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With Python - I can take a string and return it with multibyte characters UTF-8 escaped:

$ python3 -c 'print("hello ☺ world".encode("utf-8"))'
b'hello \xe2\x98\xba world'

Or unicode escaped:

$ python3 -c 'print("hello ☺ world".encode("unicode-escape"))'
b'hello \\u263a world'

Can Perl do something like this? I tried "quotemeta" but it seems it is not the right tool:

$ perl -e 'print quotemeta("hello ☺ world\n");'
hello\ \�\�\�\ world\
unicode-escapes utf-8 unicode perl escaping
1 Answers

Data::Dumper, for one, can do this.

use utf8;
use Encode;
use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;   # suppress  '$VAR1 = ...' header
$Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1;   # make output printable

print Dumper("hello ☺ world");
print Dumper(encode("UTF-8","hello ☺ world"));

Output:

"hello \x{263a} world"
"hello \342\230\272 world"

Update: the relevant function in the Data::Dumper module is qquote, so you can skip setting $Useqq and $Terse:

use utf8;
use Encode;
use Data::Dumper;

print Data::Dumper::qquote("hello ☺ world"), "\n";
print Data::Dumper::qquote(encode("UTF-8","hello ☺ world")), "\n";
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