linux - How to convert uXXXX unicode to UTF-8 using console tools in *nix

Question

I use curl to get some URL response, it's JSON response and it contains unicode-escaped national characters like u0144 (ń) and u00f3 (ó).

How can I convert them to UTF-8 or any other encoding to save into file?

Answer 1

Might be a bit ugly, but echo -e should do it:

echo -en "$(curl $URL)"

-e interprets escapes, -n suppresses the newline echo would normally add.

Note: The u escape works in the bash builtin echo, but not /usr/bin/echo.

As pointed out in the comments, this is bash 4.2+, and 4.2.x have a bug handling 0x00ff/17 values (0x80-0xff).