Unicode

Abstract

Unicode is an international character-encoding standard designed to support the electronic exchange, processing, storage, and display of the written texts of all of the world’s languages and scripts, including scientific, mathematical, and technical symbols. Unicode is an encoding standard, not a software program or a font. The standard is independent of operating systems, programming languages, database management systems, and hardware platforms. Before Unicode, there were hundreds of different encoding schemes; no single one could contain enough characters. The European Union alone required several for its languages.