I was looking for a way to easily find an Unicode value for a character in Vim.

The solution is actually quite trivial, move the cursor on a char and write ‘g8′ you should see the UTF-8 value for this char.

For example with a left curly bracket ‘{‘ Vim displays ’7b’ which results in U+007B.

It is also possible to use ‘ga’ to get the decimal, hexadecimal and octal value of a string.

How to find the unicode value of a character ?

Unicode characters are commonly referred to using a notation like U+nnnn where nnnn is a four-digit hexadecimal (base 16) number specifying the code position of the character in Unicode. For example, the space character has the same code number in Unicode as in ISO 8859-1, namely 32 decimal, 20 hexadecimal; thus, it can be denoted as U+0020. Generally, a notation like U+nnnn is needed for referring to characters uniquely in contexts where one cannot reliably present the character itself.

Source : http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/all.html

Useful links

• Vim man page about g8
• Vim man page about ga
• Full Unicode table
• Zvon character search