Unicode 1.9

Unicode is an international character encoding standard that assigns a unique numeric code to every character from every writing system, making it possible to represent text in any language or script.

Unicode was created to overcome the limitations of earlier character encodings, which were limited to a specific language or script. It aims to provide a universal encoding standard that includes all characters from all writing systems.

Unicode represents characters using a unique numeric code called a code point. Each code point is assigned to a specific character and can be represented using different encoding schemes, such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.

ASCII is a character encoding standard that represents basic English characters using 7-bits, providing a total of 128 characters. In contrast, Unicode provides a much broader range, supporting characters from all writing systems across various languages.

Yes, Unicode aims to include all characters from all writing systems in its standard. However, new characters are added in each version of Unicode, so it continuously evolves to cover a broader range of characters.

Using Unicode allows for seamless interoperability between different systems and platforms, as it provides a universal standard for representing text. It eliminates the need for multiple character encodings and simplifies multilingual text processing.

Most modern programming languages and applications have built-in support for Unicode. They provide libraries and functions to handle Unicode text, enabling developers to work with different character sets and languages.

Unicode normalization forms are standardized ways of representing equivalent characters or sequences of characters. They help in ensuring consistent and predictable handling of text, especially when dealing with different combining characters or diacritics.

Text can be converted between different Unicode encodings using appropriate encoding/decoding functions provided by programming languages or libraries. It involves encoding the text in one encoding scheme and then decoding it in another encoding scheme.

For everyday computer usage, understanding the basics of Unicode is not necessary. Most software and systems handle Unicode transparently, allowing users to work with text in any language or script without requiring explicit knowledge of the underlying encoding.