What is Unicode?
What is Unicode? Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. Characters Before Unicode Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different systems, called character encodings, for assigning these numbers. These early character encodings were limited and could not contain enough characters to cover all the world's languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use. Early character encodings also conflicted with one another. That is, two encodings could use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially servers) would need to support m...