In the world of computer programming, encoding text consistently and accurately is crucial. This is where Unicode comes into play. Unicode is an industry standard that ensures the proper encoding of written text. In this blog post, we will dive into the basics of Unicode, with a particular focus on its most widely-used encoding, UTF-8.

Understanding Unicode

Unicode is a comprehensive system that aims to support every written language in the world. Its purpose is to assign a unique number, known as a “code point,” to every character in every language, across all platforms. Code points are represented in the format U+, ranging from U+0000 to U+10FFFF.

One example of a code point is U+004F, which represents the character ‘O’. It’s important to note that the interpretation of a code point depends on the character encoding being used.

Unicode Scripts and Planes

Unicode organizes characters into groups called “scripts.” Each script corresponds to a different character set, such as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and many more. You can find a full list of scripts defined by the ISO 15924 standard.

Additionally, Unicode categorizes characters into “planes.” The first plane, known as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), contains most of the commonly used characters and symbols. There are 16 additional planes known as “astral planes,” which are currently mostly empty.

Working with Code Units and Characters

Internally, code points are stored as “code units.” The length of a code unit varies depending on the character encoding being used. UTF-8, the most popular encoding in the Unicode family, uses an 8-bit code unit. UTF-16 uses a 16-bit code unit, while UTF-32 uses a 32-bit code unit. If a code point requires more than one code unit, it will be represented accordingly.

A “grapheme” represents a unit of a writing system. It is essentially your interpretation of a character and how it should look. On the other hand, a “glyph” refers to the visual representation of a grapheme.

Digging Deeper: Sequences and Normalization

Unicode allows for the combination of different characters to form a grapheme. For example, the letter ‘é’ can be expressed as a combination of the letter ’e’ (U+0065) and the “COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT” character (U+0301). This is achieved by using a sequence of code points. This concept is particularly relevant for accented characters.

Normalization is a process that ensures consistent representation of characters. It analyzes a string for different possible combinations of code points and generates a string with the canonical representation of each character. This step is necessary to ensure two seemingly identical strings are considered equal.

Embracing Emojis

Emojis, which are part of the Unicode astral plane, allow for the representation of images using font glyphs rather than actual images. For example, the 🐶 symbol is encoded as U+1F436. Emojis have gained popularity and have become a common form of communication in various applications and platforms.

The ASCII Connection

The first 128 characters of Unicode align with the ASCII character set. The ASCII characters are encoded using a single byte. These characters include numbers, letters, and symbols commonly used in Western languages. The compatibility with ASCII played a significant role in the adoption of Unicode.

The World of Unicode Encodings

Unicode offers different encodings to represent its vast array of characters. UTF-8, designed to be backward compatible with ASCII, is the most widely used encoding today. It uses a variable width system, ranging from 1 to 4 bytes. UTF-16, another popular encoding, uses a minimum of 2 bytes to represent characters. UTF-32 always uses 4 bytes, making it less space-efficient but faster in terms of processing.

In conclusion, Unicode and its encodings, specifically UTF-8, play a critical role in encoding and representing written text accurately and consistently. Understanding the basics of Unicode and UTF-8 is essential for developers working with multilingual applications.

Tags: Unicode, UTF-8, character encoding, code point, grapheme, glyph, normalization, ASCII, UTF-16, UTF-32