Convert UTF-8 to Code Points

A codepoint is a number identifying a character in the Unicode standard (U+0000 to U+10FFFF). A UTF-8 byte is one of 1-4 bytes the codepoint serializes to in UTF-8. 🌍 is ONE codepoint (U+1F30D) but takes FOUR UTF-8 bytes (F0 9F 8C 8D). This tool extracts codepoints; the sister UTF-8 to Bytes tool extracts the bytes.

Codepoints and bytes are different abstractions. Codepoints are the conceptual character identifiers; UTF-8 is just one of several ways to serialize them. UTF-32 would store each codepoint in 4 fixed-width bytes; UTF-16 may use 2 or 4 bytes (surrogate pairs); UTF-8 uses 1-4. This tool reports the codepoint, which is encoding-independent.

For documentation: U+ notation. For HTML embedding: &#xHH; (hex) or &#NN; (decimal). For JavaScript source: u{XXXX} (ES2015+) or uXXXX (pre-ES2015, BMP only). For Python source: uXXXX for BMP, UXXXXXXXX for non-BMP. For CSS: HHHH (note trailing space terminator). Decimal: rare but appears in some encoding specs.

Pads short hex with leading zeros to a minimum width. A (U+41) with padding 4 → U+0041; with padding 0 → U+41. Python U always needs 8 hex digits regardless of value, so 8 padding is mandatory for that format. 6 covers the full Unicode range up to U+10FFFF.

Regex-based extraction in priority order: U+HEX, u{HEX}, UHHHHHHHH, uHHHH, &#xHEX;, &#NN;, CSS HEX , 0xHEX. Anything matched is parsed as that format. If nothing matches, the input is split on whitespace and parsed as hex.

Values > U+10FFFF and surrogates U+D800-U+DFFF throw position-specific errors. Surrogates are reserved exclusively for UTF-16 encoding – they shouldn’t appear as standalone codepoints.

The grid labels each codepoint by its Unicode plane. ASCII: U+0000-U+007F. BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane): U+0000-U+FFFF. SMP (Supplementary Multilingual Plane): U+10000-U+1FFFF (emoji, ancient scripts). SIP (Supplementary Ideographic Plane): U+20000-U+2FFFF (rare CJK). Higher planes (TIP, SSP) are edge cases.

No. Everything runs locally in your browser – nothing is sent to a server, logged, or stored, and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.

200,000 characters. Codepoint output can be up to ~5× input characters depending on format.

The Unicode→Code Points tool has the same algorithm. This one is filed under UTF-8 and emphasizes the codepoint-vs-byte distinction, with UTF-8 byte counts in the per-character grid.