See Unicode standard documentation.
This might be handy for UTF-8 encoding:
http://homepage1.nifty.com/algafield/core0.html

You mean a string containing the hex representation
for the UTF-8 bytes encoding of the string?

Or do you mean a byte array containing utf-8 bytes?

In Java, a string contains "characters" which are
UTF-16.

So a string never contains a "unicode escape sequence",
it merely contains a character. It is the compiler
which turns the escape sequence in your source code
into a "true" string.

  BugBear

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007 00:03:52 -0400, "Jeff Higgins"
<oohiggins@yahoo.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

If  by that \u4f55 you mean a single 16-bit char, you just have to
write to a Writer specifying UTF-8 as your encoding.  See
http://mindprod.com/applets/fileio.html for sample code.

If by that \u4f55 your mean 6 8-bit ASCII characters, nativetoascii
will convert it to other encodings.  see
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/native2asciiexe.html and
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/encoding.html
for details

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007 00:03:52 -0400, "Jeff Higgins"
<oohiggins@yahoo.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

If for some reason you wanted to roll your own utility, the code for
UTF-8 reading and writing its at http://mindprod.com/jgloss/utf.html

The code is primarily to help you understand the format.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com

Ok,
 Thanks everyone for the generous responses.
SadRed for the pointer to the UTF8 definition.
I found it kind of hard to follow at first, but
now that I've found some code to follow along
with, it's making more sense. Bugbear for the
NIO example, as you can see I struggle with basic
IO now I need to understand wrapping and flipping.
And Roedy whose excellent mindprod site has been
a continuing source of enlightenment, Thanks.

Anyway,
for anyone else who read my OP and was
only able to shake their head in amazement at
it's utter incomprehensibility, here is what I
had \really\ hoped to accomplish.

How to encode a Unicode scalar value in UTF8?

public class Encode
{
 public static void main(String[] args)
 {
   int[] intArray = {0x4f55};
   byte[] byteArray = encode(intArray);
   for(byte b : byteArray)
   {
     System.out.print(Integer.toString((b & 0xff) + 0x100,
16).substring(1));
   }
 }
}

prints e4bd95

where encode(int[]) is a method described at:
<http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/utf8.html>