There are many ways to represent the +1 million UTF-8 characters. Take the latin capital "A" with macron (A). This is unicode code point U+0100, hex number 0xc4 0x80, decimal number 196 128, and binary 11000100 10000000.

I would like to create a collection of the first 65,535 UTF-8 characters for use in testing applications. These are all unicode characters up to code point U+FFFF (byte3).

Is it possible to do something like a for($x=0) loop and then convert the resulting decimal to another base (like hex) which would allow the creation of the matching unicode character?

I can create the value A using something like this:

$char = "\xc4\x80";
// or
$char = chr(196).chr(128);

However, I am not sure how to turn this into an automated process.

// fail!
$char = "\x". dechex($a). "\x". dexhex($$b);