Unicode
What is Unicode?
Unicode provides a unique number for every character,
no matter what the platform,
no matter what the program,
no matter what the language.
from What is Unicode?, The Unicode Consortium
Different Encodings for Unicode
Letter/characters maps to a "code point". Different ways of arranging the bytes to represent the code points.
- utf-8: variable-length (1 to 4 bytes; characters 0-127 are all one byte)
- utf-16: variable-length (2 or 4 bytes; 1 or 2 2-byte unit)
- utf-32: fixed-length (4 bytes)
Want more? See:
- What is Unicode?
- Browse the Unicode Character Code Charts
- And two more in-depth articles: