In Java, both Character and char are Unicode.  So, you can unbox Character to char but you'll still have unicode.

Also, although it intuitively seems like converting unicode to ascii should be easy, I've spens a bunch of time with this and was never able to do it completely.  Here is what I have been using:

From chatGPT:

import java.text.Normalizer;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class UnicodeToAsciiConverter {

    public static String convertToAscii(String unicodeStr) {
        String normalized = Normalizer.normalize(unicodeStr, Normalizer.Form.NFD);
        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("[^\\p{ASCII}]");
        return pattern.matcher(normalized).replaceAll("");
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String unicodeString = "Héllo, Wörld! 👋"; // Example Unicode string
        String asciiString = convertToAscii(unicodeString);
        System.out.println("Original Unicode String: " + unicodeString);
        System.out.println("Converted ASCII String: " + asciiString);
    }
}

--blake