Unicode
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Unicode is a standard for encoding and sorting text characters, with a current limit of 4,294,967,296 different characters, of which less than a million have been assigned. There are various different encodings under the Unicode standard, such as UTF-8, UCS-2, UCS-4, and UTF-16 (same as UCS-2 but with an addition of delegates to allow access to various code points outside the 0-65535 range). Most modern software that uses Unicode for text use either UTF-8 or UTF-16. (Interesting tidbit: under the hood, Windows NT and its successors use UTF-16 for text strings, and the ANSI versions of Win32 API functions merely translate text input and output between the local code page and UTF-16.)
External links
- Wikipedia Unicode article
- Joel Spolsky's "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html)
