Share:
Glossary Data & Encoding

Unicode

Unicode is the universal standard that gives every character in the world's writing systems, plus symbols and emoji, a unique number called a code point.

Last reviewed:

AdSense Placeholder
Slot: header_reference_page

In more detail

Code points are written U+0041 for A or U+1F600 for a smiling face. Unicode defines the characters; encodings such as UTF-8 define how code points are stored as bytes. Look-alike and invisible characters can be abused, for example to disguise a domain name.

Try these tools

Unicode Character Inspector

Paste text to see every character's code point, general category, script, UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 code units and escapes for JavaScript.

Invisible Character Detector

Find hidden Unicode in text and code: zero-width spaces, bidirectional overrides, non-breaking spaces.

See also

  • Glossary UTF-8
    UTF-8 is the dominant Unicode encoding, writing each character as one to four bytes and staying identical to ASCII for the first 128.
  • Glossary ASCII
    ASCII is a 7-bit character encoding that assigns numbers 0 to 127 to English letters, digits, punctuation and control codes.
Back to Glossary
AdSense Placeholder
Slot: footer_leaderboard