What is Unicode and How is it Used?
A universal, one-all use reference character system or set, a Rosetta stone (encoding standard), if you will for IT, acting as an encoding tool and standard, mapping byte values to characters, for multi-lingual support. This refers to an industry standard for computing for consistency, pertaining to text (its appearance, display, edits and manipulation qualities, characteristics) Universal character sets encodings, numeration, upper and lower case, rendering, (what and how it look as and are represented), normalization-standards, collation. Unifying (similar) code (meaning) for multi-lingual environments, character encoding and deciphering creates a ‘commonality’.
It is all about planes, blocks and characters with Unicode and different sets of code. It tries to find common ground and use ONE reference system of characters. Surrogates, non-characters, control, format, reserved, private, graphic characters are all included.
It is like a ‘common language standard set’ to communicate and collaborate. Useful for hardware, software, developers, text-processing standards and protocol enablers, supporting language and script, programming and developing. It includes Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese characters for example as well. Single uni-code system characters, to search, modify and encode text. It is invaluable for validating text input, extracting text and/or reformatting data. Used more often than ASCII text. Can be adjusted for inter-operatability and optimizing compatibility.
Key Exam Points
- Use Unicode, searching, modifying and/or encoding/decoding text, not as a type, but a standard.
- For the exam study examples for Unicode, UTF-16 (and/or UTF-8 internally), encoding and decoding characters, that help you to gain a better understanding, as well as ASCII/ANSI/ISO, Unicode standard at www.unicode.org
- Using the encoding class, specify it when reading/writing a file, reading and writing an actual encoded file, concerting text to encoded type
Related Terms
Code page, Regular Expression.
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