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Unicode Covers All Major Living Languages
Unicode is a method of encoding characters in computers.
UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format.
There 8, 16 and 32 bit Unicode transformation formats (UTF)
UTF-16 and UTF-32 are not byte oriented and so a byte order must be selected when transmitting them over a byte oriented network or storing them in a byte oriented file. Some systems store data with most significant byte (MSB) first (big-endian) and others with it last (little-endian). A byte order mark (BOM) consists of the character code U+FEFF at the beginning of a data stream, where it can be used as a signature defining the byte order and encoding form, primarily of unmarked plaintext files. See: unicode.org, Allan Wood's Unicode Page Reference.com (Table of Unicode characters, 128 to 999 Table of Unicode characters from 1 to 65535 at unicode.coeurlumiere.com Some of the Languages in the Unicode Character Database (UCD) . See a larger list at Alan Wood's Unicode and Multilingual Support in HTML
ISO/ANSI vs charactersCharacters 33-126 (letters, numbers and special characters (standard keyboard characters) are the same for ANSI and ECS, however the other characters are not the same. Eg. the British Pound character is 156 in ECS and 163 in ANSI.UTF-8 is an 8 bit code (256 values) that contains only ASCII characters and is identical to an ASCII file which represents the roman letters (upper and lower case), numbers, punctuation and control characters. Unicode is a 16-bit character set (65,536 values) designed to cover all the world's major living languages, in addition to scientific symbols and dead languages that are the subject of scholarly interest. It also includes emojis It eliminates the complexity of multibyte character sets that are currently used on UNIX and Windows to support Asian languages. Unicode was created by a consortium of companies including Apple, Microsoft, HP, Digital and IBM and merged its efforts with the ISO-10646 standard to produce a single standard in 1993. Unicode is already the basis for at least one operating system: Windows/NT.
they are represented by U+xxxx, where x is a hexadecimal character 0-F, where F represents decimal 16.
A generic white grinning face emoji ☺ code is U+263A ☺ . Unicode is a 16-bit character set where all characters occupy the same space. The first 256 values are the same as the ISO-Latin character set, which is also the basis for the ANSI Character set used in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. But Unicode goes on to define 34,168 distinct coded characters. In most character sets a single value is often assigned to several characters. For example, in ASCII a "-" is used to represent a hyphen, a minus sign, a dash and a non-breaking hyphen. In Unicode each meaning is given its own code. The Unicode standard contains only one instance of each character and assigns it a unique name and code value. It also supports "combining" accent characters, which follow the base character that they are to modify.
See Also:
UTF-8 Encoding | FileFormat.info
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