Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard that defines a comprehensive list of characters from various writings systems, symbols, emoji and more, and assigns a unique number for each of them. It includes characters from almost all the scripts used in modern and ancient languages, including Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, and thousands of others.

The purpose of Unicode is to allow computer programs to represent every character in every language uniformly, regardless of the platform, application or programming language used. It eliminates the restrictions of traditional character encoding systems such as ASCII that are limited to only 128 characters.

The Unicode standard consists of several components, including the character set, the encoding forms, and the Unicode character database. The character set is a list of all the characters supported by Unicode, while the encoding forms define how those characters can be represented as a sequence of bytes. The Unicode character database contains detailed information about each character, including the name, script, and other metadata.

One of the most common encoding forms used in Unicode is UTF-8, which is a variable-length encoding that represents each character using one to four bytes. It is backwards-compatible with ASCII, and most English-language text in UTF-8 can be read as ASCII by software that does not support Unicode.

Unicode has become the standard for text representation in modern computing, and it has enabled greater compatibility between software and systems used in different parts of the world. From web pages to databases and mobile devices, Unicode makes it possible to communicate in multiple languages with ease.

Examples

Here are some examples of Unicode characters:

• "A" is represented by the hexadecimal number 0041.

• "Ö" (pronounced "o" with two dots above) is represented by the hexadecimal number 00D6.

• "☺" (a smiling face) is represented by the hexadecimal number 263A.

• "🐶" (a cute dog emoji) is represented by the hexadecimal number 1F436.

These characters can be used in programming languages, text editors, web pages and more, and they will display correctly as long as the software supports Unicode.