Friday 13 June 2014

UniCode

Why Unicode Came ?
Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems existed. No single encoding could contain enough characters. These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. To solve the problems with different encoding mechanisms unicode came into picture.

How Unicode solves the problem ?
Unicode provides a unique number for every character. Unicode standard is adopted by several industry leaders like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys etc.,

The Unicode Standard provides the capacity to encode all of the characters used for the written languages of the world. To keep character coding simple and efficient, the Unicode Standard assigns each character a unique numeric value and name.

Encoding Forms
The Unicode Standard defines three encoding forms that allow the same data to be transmitted in a byte, word or double word oriented format (i.e. in 8, 16 or 32-bits per code unit). All three encoding forms encode the same common character repertoire and can be efficiently transformed into one another without loss of data.

UTF-8 is a way of transforming all Unicode characters into a variable length encoding of bytes. It has the advantages that the Unicode characters corresponding to the familiar ASCII set have the same byte values as ASCII, and that Unicode characters transformed into UTF-8 can be used with much existing software without extensive software rewrites.

UTF-16 is popular in many environments that need to balance efficient access to characters with economical use of storage. It is reasonably compact and all the heavily used characters fit into a single 16-bit code unit, while all other characters are accessible via pairs of 16-bit code units.

UTF-32 is useful where memory space is no concern, but fixed width, single code unit access to characters is desired. Each Unicode character is encoded in a single 32-bit code unit when using UTF-32.

For More information about unicode





                                                             Home

No comments:

Post a Comment