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Unicode

Unicode

An internationalised character set. cf ASCII, BOM.

If viewed using an ASCII text editor a Unicode file will typically appear as though every other character is a letter. This is because Unicode (typically) uses two bytes per character compared with ASCII's one byte per character.

Unicode characters when written are expressed as "U+xxxx" where "xxxx" are hex digits that define that character. So U+0041 is the letter "A", which (by design) is the same as the ASCII code for "A".

Relevant links:

www.unicode.org - Unicode Home Page, providing information about and resources relating to Unicode.
www.unicode.org/charts - Unicode character code charts by script.
www.sql-und-xml.de/unicode-database - Unicode-Characters which can be used in Html/XML, ordered by block, category and other properties. (Site in German, but the tables should be intelligible whatever your language.)
www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html - Article aimed at developers giving the rational behind Unicode and how it relates to other character sets and encodings.
www.jbrowse.com/text/ - Unicode terms, FAQs and mistakes.
http://everything.explained.at/unicode/ - Unicode explained.

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