Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.

Description

Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode contains a repertoire of more than 110,000 characters covering 100 scripts and multiple symbol sets.

The standard consists of a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding method and set of standard character encodings, a set of reference data files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).

As of June 2014, the most recent version is Unicode 7.0 (with Unicode 8.0, now in beta, expected in June 2015). The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium.

Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software.

The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including:

• Modern operating systems
• XML
• Java (programming language)
• Microsoft .NET Framework

Character encodings

Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings.

The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2.

See also

• ASCII
• Character encoding
• Internationalization
• Localization
• Text
• Unicode symbol
• Universal Character Set
• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• Writing system

External links

• Unicode @ Wikipedia
• UT - Unicode Table
  • Website for quickly finding useful Unicode characters - Unicode Table has something over the other Unicode table sites: predictive search. There's useful tools as well: a HTML endoder/decoder, text-flipper