A script to escape a String into unicode characters for double bytes strings

escape_unicode.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
puts "Enter content and press Ctrl+D when ready"
old_stty = `stty -g`
# Set up the terminal in non-canonical mode input processing
# This causes the terminal to process one character at a time
system "stty -icanon min 1 time 0 -isig"
answer = ""
while true
  char = STDIN.getc
  break if char == ?\C-d # break on Ctrl-d
  answer += char.chr
end

puts "\n\nOutput:"
puts answer.unpack('U*').map{ |i| i < 128 ? i.chr : '\u' + i.to_s(16).rjust(4, '0') }.join
system "stty #{old_stty}" # restore stty settings

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3727466/multi-line-input-problems-when-using-stdin-gets was the key to get the multi line input correctly.