• It's a much more comprehensive character encoding standard that aims to represent every character from every written system in use today.
• Character is not the right terminology. It's better to use the word grapheme, which means a single unit of a human writing system.
• It assigns a unique number, called a code point, to "things" regardless of platform, program, or language.
  • "Things" because "ã" is two code points. The letter and the tilda.
  • ==grapheme != code point != a byte==
    • Making this mistake have a price.
• Unicode uses a variety of encoding schemes to represent these code points, one of which is UTF-8.
• Some examples of grapheme not available on ASCII.
  • Chinese: 你好世界
  • Arabic: مرحبا بالعالم
  • Mongolian: Сайн уу Дэлхий (Cyrillic)
  • Hindi: हैलो वर्ल्ड (Devanagari)
  • Emojis: 🤓
• Functions that don't understand unicode are called unicode unaware string functions.
  • len(🤓) is 4 but the answer we want is probably 1.
  • If unicode is important in the language is best to use functions that can handle them.
  • 👍🏽 is a good test, it uses a regular thumbs up plus a skin modifier. It's one graphene, two code points, and 4 bytes.

Encoding

The process of turning the code point to binary.

• UTF-32
• UTF-8