Unicode
Computer Science: OCR A Level, topic 4.1.22
Unicode
Unicode is a character set which was released because of the need to standardise character sets internationally.
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.
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.
Types of characters
- Unicode represents characters from all major alphabets of the world.
- Unicode is also used to represent emojis!
Test yourself on Unicode
Why are the first 256 characters in Unicode identical to extended ASCII?
What characters are supported by Unicode?
Which of these can be represented using Unicode?