How to see the difference between two characters (hyphen and dash) ?

Javascript Solution

The first solution is based on javascript but every language should give you a function to get the unicode code point

let codePoint = character.charCodeAt(0).toString(16)

• The first one is a dash cldr/utility/character.jsp
• The second is an hyphen (minus). cldr/utility/character.jsp

Bash with Hexdump Solution

Diff between Characters with an hex tool such as hexdump on Unix that output hexadecimal digits

Steps:

• The Character Set is UTF8. We got then hexadecimal in UTF8.

echo $LANG

en_US.UTF-8

• The Hexadecimal in UTF8 of the first character is e2 80 93. It corresponds to the unicode character 2013 - EN DASH. See Translation of a UTF-8 Multibyte sequence to Unicode - Example 2. 0a is the end of file.

echo – | hexdump -C

00000000  e2 80 93 0a                                       |....|
00000004

• The Hexadecimal in UTF8 of the first character is 2d. This is the unicode character 2d - Hyphen Minus

echo  - | hexdump -C

00000000  2d 0a                                             |-.|
00000002