Some ways to transform unicode to char in PHP

uchr.php

<?php

function uchrA($str) {
    return html_entity_decode(preg_replace('/\\\u([\da-fA-F]{4})/', '&#x\1;', $str));
}

function uchrB($str) {
    return utf8_decode(json_decode(sprintf('"%s"', $str)));
}

$str = '\\u00C2';
var_dump(uchrA($str) === uchrB($str));