Unicode (2024)

FAQs

What do you mean by Unicode? ›

Unicode is an international character encoding standard that provides a unique number for every character across languages and scripts, making almost all characters accessible across platforms, programs, and devices.

ASCII is a character encoding system that only includes up to 256 characters, primarily composed of English letters, numbers, and symbols. It uses up to eight bits to represent each character. In contrast, Unicode is a much larger encoding standard that includes over 149,000 characters.

Unicode supports more than a million code points, which are written with a "U" followed by a plus sign and the number in hex; for example, the word "Hello" is written U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F (see hex chart).

Inserting Unicode characters

To insert a Unicode character, type the character code, press ALT, and then press X. For example, to type a dollar symbol ($), type 0024, press ALT, and then press X. For more Unicode character codes, see Unicode character code charts by script.

One of the main benefits of Unicode is its ability to support multilingual environments. By using a unified encoding system, it enables seamless communication and data exchange across different platforms and devices.

Unicode uses two encoding forms: 8-bit and 16-bit, based on the data type of the data that is being that is being encoded. The default encoding form is 16-bit, where each character is 16 bits (2 bytes) wide. Sixteen-bit encoding form is usually shown as U+hhhh, where hhhh is the hexadecimal code point of the character.

Here are some disadvantages of Unicode: More bits are needed for non-ASCII characters, which cause documents to take up more space than with encoding that are specific to a particular language or writing system.

Unicode is a common, massive character set for all the world's languages, glyphs and emoji. The UTF encoding family is how computers know which sequence of bits should be represented as which character.

The only difference between the Unicode and the non-Unicode versions is whether OAWCHAR or char data type is used for character data. The length arguments always indicate the number of characters, not the number of bytes.

Emoji, which are treated as pictographs, are encoded in the Unicode Standard based primarily on their general appearance, not on an intended meaning.

How is Unicode used today? ›

Unicode is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages, and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, each being code-for-code identical with one another.

With TEXT encoding, you can use all the most common characters in the alphabet. With UNICODE encoding, you can use special characters, like chinese, arabic, emoticons, ...

WordPad. Open the file with WordPad. Go to File -> Save As -> in the drop down menu just below the file name field change the file type from Unicode Text Document to Text Document. Now enter the file name you want remembering to specify the suffix you want such as .

— Press the `+` key on the numeric keypad. — Type the hexadecimal Unicode value. — Release the `Alt` key. — In the registry under `HKEY_Current_User/Control Panel/Input Method`, set EnableHexNumpad to “1”.

A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet.

Unicode is the universal character encoding used to process, store and facilitate the interchange of text data in any language while ASCII is used for the representation of text such as symbols, letters, digits, etc. in computers. ASCII : It is a character encoding standard for electronic communication.

The only difference between the Unicode and the non-Unicode versions is whether OAWCHAR or char data type is used for character data. The length arguments always indicate the number of characters, not the number of bytes. OAWCHAR is mapped to the C Unicode data type wchar_t.