A standard to encode characters across different languages. Use this tag if your question is about how to encode a word within a software product or website using Unicode.
Unicode is the standard for computer representation of plain text. It encompasses:
- the Universal Character Set (UCS), intended to unambiguously represent all characters used in human writing systems in any language,
- Unicode Transformation Formats (UTFs), defining standardized formats for storing and transmitting Unicode text, and
- standards for processing and manipulating Unicode text.
The latest version is 6.0, published in 2011.
The Universal Character Set
Unicode assigns each character an integer code point (from 0 to 0x10FFFF) in the UCS to act as a unique reference. For example:
- U+0041 A
- U+0042 B
- U+0043 C
- ...
- U+039B Λ
- U+039C Μ
Unicode Transformation Formats
UTFs describe how to encode code points as byte representations. The most common forms are UTF-8 (which encodes code points as a sequence of one, two, three or four bytes) and UTF-16 (which encodes code points as two or four bytes).
Code Point UTF-8 UTF-16 (big-endian)
U+0041 41 00 41
U+0042 42 00 42
U+0043 43 00 43
...
U+039B CE 9B 03 9B
U+039C CE 9C 03 9C
Specification
The Unicode Consortium also defines standards for sorting and collation algorithms, rules for capitalization, character normalization and other locale-sensitive character operations.
