command line byte sequence

How do you express a byte sequence from the command line? i.e like you would in PHP开发者_StackOverflow社区 with the following:

<?php
echo "\xC2\xA3"

usage: for passing a Unicode string to a script or program. The above example is the UK pound sign "£"

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echo -e "\xC2\xA3"

or

echo $'\xc2\xa3'

the latter may be bash-specific, I don't remember.

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$ printf "\xC2\xA3"
£