Unicode Espace Generator for Java Properties (Bash wrapper for native2ascii JDK tool)

uescape.properties.sh

#!/bin/bash

tmp=tmp-unicode-escape.txt
tmp_out=out-$tmp

text="$1"
if [ ! -n "$text" ]; then
        echo "first arg must be the text to escape"
        exit 1
fi

echo "$text" > $tmp

native2ascii -encoding utf8 $tmp $tmp_out

cat $tmp_out
rm $tmp $tmp_out

Example:

user@domain:~$ ./uescape.properties.sh áéíóú
\u00e1\u00e9\u00ed\u00f3\u00fa