Unicode

Unicode is the international character encoding standard that assigns a unique code point (U+0000 through U+10FFFF) to every character of nearly all the world's writing systems, with a codespace of 1,114,112 code points.

Purpose

It replaces fragmented regional encodings with a single character set covering global scripts, eliminating mojibake and transcoding burdens.

Mechanism

Code points are written U+XXXX and divided into 17 planes. Code points must pass through an encoding form (UTF-8/16/32) to become bytes. Characters can carry combining marks, so the same visual character may correspond to multiple code point sequences (requiring NFC/NFD normalization).

Use cases

Multilingual web content and database storage
Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n)
Emoji and symbol rendering
Cross-platform text exchange

Examples

Input
```
é
```
Output
```
U+00E9
```
The code point of é (Latin small letter e with acute)

Common errors

Truncating a string by character count and splitting a surrogate pair: Use surrogate-pair-aware APIs such as Intl.Segmenter

Related terms

UTF-8 is Unicode's variable-length encoding form, using 1 to 4 bytes per code point; it is fully backward compatible with ASCII and is the de facto standard for the web and modern systems.

UTF-16 is Unicode's variable-length encoding form, using 2 or 4 bytes per code point: BMP characters take one 16-bit code unit and supplementary-plane characters take a surrogate pair (2 code units).

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit character encoding standard that defines 128 characters (0-127), covering English letters, digits, punctuation, and control characters.

A code point is the numeric value the Unicode standard assigns to each character (U+0000 to U+10FFFF), the character's position number in the codespace.

A surrogate pair is the UTF-16 mechanism that represents one supplementary-plane code point (U+10000 through U+10FFFF) using two 16-bit code units.

The BOM (byte order mark) is the Unicode character U+FEFF, placed at the start of a text stream to indicate the encoding form and byte order.

Related tools

Unicode Converter

Convert text to Unicode code points, UTF-8 hex, or UTF-16 hex online. Free, private, and 100% client-side.

Charset Reference

Reference table of character encodings. Free, private, 100% client-side.

Encoding Detector

Check text encoding: ASCII subset, UTF-8 BOM, and non-ASCII characters. Text input is always re-encoded as UTF-8, so legacy encodings (GBK/Big5/Shift-JIS) cannot be distinguished — the tool honestly reports the UTF-8 byte form. Free, private, 100% client-side.

Unicode Unescape

Unicode Unescape — pure client-side tool. Privacy-first, no server round-trip.

References