Unicode
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unicode is a standard for computers to make them able to show text in different languages. Unicode standards are created by the Unicode Consortium. Their goal is to replace current character encoding standards with a single worldwide standard for all languages. There are almost 100,000 characters in the latest definition of Unicode.
Currently, there are different ways to encode Unicode, the most common ones are:
- UTF-7 Uses 7 bits per character; relatively unpopular; officially not part of Unicode
- UTF-8 Uses 8 bits per character; a variable-width encoding that keeps compatibility with ASCII; the most common characters can be coded in 2 bytes
- UTF-16 Uses 16 bits per character; also variable-width encoding
- UTF-32 Uses 32 bits per character; a fixed width encoding
UTF8 is the most common of these. It is used for electronic mail, Java also uses a variant of it.
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