3.2.3

Unicode

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Unicode

Unicode is a character set which was released because of the need to standardise character sets internationally.

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Unicode

  • Unicode aims to represent every possible character in the world.
  • The most common form of Unicode is UTF-8 and uses between eight and 32 bit binary codes to represent each character.
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Compatability with ASCII

  • The first 256 characters in Unicode are identical to extended ASCII, which makes it backwards compatible with documents encoded using older character sets.
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Types of characters

  • Unicode represents characters from all major alphabets of the world.
  • Unicode is also used to represent emojis!

Representing Text

Text data is made up of characters. Character sets allow us to store characters digitally.

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Character sets

  • Text data is made up of characters.
  • Each character is assigned its own character code.
  • A character set is a collection of all the characters that a computer recognises (letters, numbers, symbols, etc), along with their binary codes.
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ASCII

  • Each character in ASCII is represented by a seven-bit binary code.
  • Each letter is represented by seven bits.
  • This is useful because when used in an 8-bit system, the extra bit can be used as a check digit.
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Unicode

  • Unicode aims to represent every possible character in the world.
  • The most common form of Unicode is UTF-8, and uses between eight and 48 bit binary codes to represent each character.

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4Computers

5Communication & The Internet

6The Bigger Picture

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