Unicode is a standard for representing all the characters of the world in a common system. Older character encoding schemes like ASCII were primarily designed based on English, and thus had limitations in representing characters from various languages. Unicode was designed to address these issues.
Unicode assigns a unique number to each character, which supports a total of 143,859 characters, including not only the characters of each country but also symbols, special characters, and control characters. This allows Unicode to harmoniously represent almost all characters in the world.
Unicode consists of the following components:
- Code Point: Each character has a unique code point, displayed in hexadecimal following ‘U+’, like U+0000.
- Code Plane: Unicode is divided into 17 code planes, with each plane capable of containing up to 65,536 characters. Most common characters are found in the first plane, known as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
- Character Set: A collection of code points, Unicode separates character sets from encoding rules to support various encoding methods.
The introduction of Unicode plays a very important role in internationalization (I18n) and localization (L10n) efforts. It provides a necessary technical foundation for developers or systems working in multilingual support environments. As multilingual text processing is becoming increasingly important, especially in web development, data science, and machine learning, understanding Unicode is essential.