Unicode

Unicode is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 15.1 defines 1,49,813 characters and 161 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts.

Unicode encodes thousands of emoji. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters.

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding standard. It uses one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units.

The first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII.

A whole graphic character can take more than 4 bytes, because it is made of more than one code point.

Code Points

The code points are written as hexadecimal numbers. At least four hexadecimal digits are always written. The two-character prefix U+ always precedes a written code point. For example, uppercase A is written as U+0041 (equivalent to 65 in ASCII).

Each character has a code number. You can write in HTML by using either hexadecimal or its equivalent decimal number. For example, to output uppercase A:

For decimal number, always include & and # at the beginning of the number and ; at the end.

<p>&#65;</p>

For hexadecimal number, include &, # and x at the beginning of the number and ; at the end.

<p>&#x0041;</p>

In the CSS, use the hexadecimal number and replace U+ with \.

For example,

content: '\0041';

Basic Latin

It is the first block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte. It contains lower half of ISO 8859-1 characters, also known as ASCII characters.

Hexadecimal equivalents for ASCII range is from 0000 to 007F.

Latin-1 Supplement

It is the second block in the Unicode standard. It encodes the upper range of ISO 8859-1. This block ranges from U+0080 to U+00FF, contains 128 characters. It includes C1 controls, Latin-1 punctuation and symbols, 30 pairs of majuscule and minuscule accented Latin characters and 2 mathematical operators.