Technology Fundamentals
Unicode
Definition
Unicode is an international character encoding standard that provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
Why It Matters
Unicode solves the problem of having hundreds of different, conflicting encoding systems. It provides a single, universal standard that allows text from any language to be represented and processed consistently across all devices and platforms.
Contextual Example
The Unicode standard assigns the code point U+1F600 to the "Grinning Face" emoji (😀). Any system that supports Unicode knows to render this code point as that specific emoji.
Common Misunderstandings
- Unicode is a standard, not an encoding itself. UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are different methods (encodings) for storing Unicode characters as binary data.
- Unicode contains over 149,000 characters, covering scripts, symbols, and emojis.