UTF-8

Hi,

I need to find out the UNICODE character codes of an UTF-8 encoded
string.
I noticed that characters with codes > 128, are represented in the
following way:
"ω", for example, is represented as "ω", without the quotes.
In fact, the "969" is the character code that I'm looking for.
My question is if there is a standard method to extract the character
code, without having to parse the string manually...

Many thx,
Florin.