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About Unicode

Unicode is the universal character encoding standard for text representation in computer processing. Unicode provides a consistent way of encoding multilingual plain text, assigning each character a unique numeric value and name. Unicode defines codes for characters used in the major languages written today. Scripts include the European alphabetic scripts, Middle Eastern right-to-left scripts, and scripts of Asian languages. Unicode also includes punctuation marks, diacritics, mathematical symbols, technical symbols, and so on.

The two most common forms of Unicode encoding are UTF-16 (where UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format) and UTF-8. UTF-16 encoding is a 16-bit format that represents each code point (each text character, non-spacing accent, or other character representation) as a sequence of two bytes. UTF-8 is a scheme for representing the 16-bit code point as a sequence of one to four bytes that can be stored, retrieved, and transmitted over a network.