Unicode Coding

Unicode is a character encoding standard designed to support the representation, processing, and exchange of text in different languages and across different computer systems. Unicode assigns a code point to each encoded character. A code point/codepoint is a numeric identifier defined by the standard; however, some representations, including certain emoji, may consist of multiple code points. Unicode characters can be represented in memory or in files using different encoding forms, including UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. Unicode Standard version 18.0, released in September 2026, contains 172,808 encoded characters.

The first 128 Unicode code points (U+0000 to U+007F) correspond to ASCII characters. Unicode also includes characters from numerous writing systems (Greek, Cyrillic, etc.), technical symbols, punctuation marks, and many other characters.

A message can be represented by replacing each character with its Unicode code point, expressed in decimal or hexadecimal notation.

Each character is associated with the following Unicode code point:

Unicode code points can be expressed in decimal or hexadecimal notation. Hexadecimal notation is often used for conciseness and is generally preceded by the U+ prefix.

To decode a sequence of values representing Unicode code points, associate each value with its corresponding character. Check whether the values are expressed in decimal or hexadecimal notation and account for the separators used.

A message of this type usually consists of numeric values separated by spaces, commas, or another separator. These values are commonly expressed in decimal or hexadecimal notation and, more rarely, in binary. For basic Latin letters without accents, the decimal codes for uppercase A-Z range from 65 to 90, while those for lowercase a-z range from 97 to 122; these values are identical in ASCII and Unicode. The presence of numbers in these ranges alone is not sufficient to confirm Unicode code point encoding.

UTF8 is a variable-length Unicode character encoding that is backward compatible with ASCII: the first 128 code points are represented by the same bytes as in ASCII. UTF-8 is the most widely used encoding on the web.

UTF16 represents code points using one or two 16-bit code units; it is used by Java and many Windows APIs.

UTF32 uses one 32-bit code unit per code point. This encoding is less common for text interchange and on the web.

The official website of the Unicode Consortium is here The official character and code point charts are available at here To consult the latest version of the standard, see here