Does kotlin have something similar to `\xFF` escapes in strings? I can only find `\uFFFF` but this w...

# getting-started

[martmists]

Does kotlin have something similar to \xFF escapes in strings? I can only find \uFFFF but this will likely create two bytes instead of one

[ephemient]

like Java, Char is a 16-bit value

[martmists]

Then what's the recommended way to create a UByteArray from a string? I currently have

fun String.toUByteArray(): UByteArray {
    val chunks = chunked(2)
    val result = UByteArray(length) {
        chunks[it].toUByte(16)
    }
    return result
}

but ideally I could just use escapes so I could do "somedata\x01\x02\x03" instead of having to write everything as hex

[ephemient]

on JVM, you could

"somedata\u0001\u0002\u0003".toByteArray(Charsets.ISO_8859_1).asUByteArray()

and on multiplatform, you could

"somedata\u0001\u0002\u0003".map { it.code.toUByte() }.toUByteArray()

but there isn't really a good ergonomic way to do this

[ephemient]

or UByteArray(string.length) { string[it].code.toUByte() } to skip the intermediate List

[martmists]

so there's no shorthand for 1-byte characters like \xFF?

[ephemient]

there are no one-byte characters

[ephemient]

even 'a' is a UTF-16 code unit