Encoding
encoding
text
characters
What is Unicode?
Definition
Unicode is a universal character set that assigns a unique code point to every character across all writing systems. It covers over 149,000 characters spanning 161 scripts, including emoji, mathematical symbols, and historic scripts.
Why It Matters
Unicode solves the problem of incompatible character encodings. Before Unicode, different systems used different code pages, causing text corruption when data moved between systems. Modern software uses Unicode (via UTF-8 or UTF-16) to handle multilingual text correctly.