View unicode codepoints for all letters in file on bash

Question

I have to deal with a file that has lot of invisible control characters, like "right to left" or "zero width non-joiner", different spaces than the normal space and so on, and I have troubles dealing with that.

Now, I would like to somehow view all letters in a given file, letter by letter (I would like to say "left to right", but I am unfortunately dealing with right-to-left language), as unicode codepoints, using only basic bash tools (like vi, less, cat...). Is it possible somehow?

I know I can display the file in hexadecimal by hexdump, but I would have to recompute the codepoints. I really want to see the actual unicode codepoints, so I can google them and find out what's happenning.

edit: I will add that I don't want to transcode it to different encoding (because that's what I am finding out online). I have the file in UTF8 and that is fine. I just want to know the exact codepoints of all the letters.

Answer 1

I wrote myself a perl one-liner, that do just that, and it also prints the original character. (It expects the file from STDIN)

perl -C7 -ne 'for(split(//)){print sprintf("U+%04X", ord)." ".$_."\n"}'

However, there should be a better way than this.