Unicode
Unicode is a standard that assigns code points and properties to characters and defines rules for representing and processing text across writing systems.
Modern C, Third Edition
Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that assigns code points and properties to characters and symbols across writing systems.
- How it is used
- Supports non-ASCII C source and text processing while distinguishing characters from their stored encodings.
- How deep it goes
- Defines code points and properties, then works through multibyte conversion concerns and UTF literals without detailing each encoding's bit layout.
- Examples
- Uses a French C identifier, Unicode escapes, UTF literal comparisons and a UTF-16 surrogate-pair example.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via C literals and conversion facilities while checking character counts and encoding assumptions.
Modern C
Unicode is an international character standard that assigns code points and properties to a unified repertoire of characters.
- How it is used
- Provides character identities for discussing special characters in C multibyte strings and Unicode escapes.
- How deep it goes
- Defines code points through a glyph distinction and describes properties, without detailing Unicode’s assignment rules.
- Examples
- Uses Latin A and Greek Alpha to distinguish characters from glyphs, and box-drawing escapes in C macros.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via C Unicode escapes to name special characters in string literals.
Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches
Unicode is a character encoding standard that assigns code points to characters across writing systems and symbols.
- How it is used
- Connects character numbers to Rust’s `char` type and explains why strings can have different byte and character counts.
- How deep it goes
- Defines Unicode through numbered characters and illustrates byte counts, without detailing the encoding rules behind those counts.
- Examples
- Uses A, 友, an emoji and strings in English and Korean to contrast character numbers with byte counts.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand why a string’s byte length may differ from its character count.
Read how Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches explains Unicode →
Python Workout: 50 ten-minute exercises
A character-representation standard that assigns abstract code points to characters across writing systems and symbols.
- How it is used
- Uses Unicode to represent multilingual Python text and distinguish text-file handling from binary-file handling.
- How deep it goes
- Explains code points, variable-length UTF-8 encoding, Python strings, and binary-file consequences.
- Examples
- Uses multilingual documents, Unicode-order string sorting, and chunked reads from binary files.
- What you can do after
- Operate Python text and binary file handling by choosing Unicode text mode or byte-oriented binary mode.
Read how Python Workout: 50 ten-minute exercises explains Unicode →
The Quick Python Book, Fourth Edition
Unicode is a character-encoding standard that assigns code points to characters across the world's writing systems and many symbols.
- How it is used
- Supports portable Unicode text, string escapes, byte conversion, and reliable reading and writing of international text files.
- How deep it goes
- Explains escapes, string-byte boundaries, UTF-8, and decoding-error options, but stops short of Unicode-system internals.
- Examples
- Demonstrates named and numeric escapes, accented characters, encode/decode conversion, incompatible types, and invalid-file-byte handling.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Python strings, encode(), decode(), and open() options to represent text and manage encoding errors.
Read how The Quick Python Book, Fourth Edition explains Unicode →
Julia as a Second Language
Unicode is a universal character standard that assigns identifiers and encoding rules to characters across writing systems.
- How it is used
- Uses Unicode to explain why Julia string lengths, byte sizes, and character indices can differ.
- How deep it goes
- Explains code points and variable-width UTF-8 with REPL examples, then demonstrates safe iteration and excerpts Julia’s nextind implementation.
- Examples
- Compares Norwegian-word lengths with byte sizes and inspects 'A', 'Æ', and '😏' using Julia functions.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose/debug surprising Julia string indices and iterate over characters without assuming one byte per character.
How Computers Make Books
Unicode is an international character-encoding standard that assigns numeric code points to characters and defines rules for their combination without prescribing their visual glyph shapes.
- How it is used
- Represents the world’s writing systems as numbers that computers can store and process.
- How deep it goes
- Explains code points, ASCII compatibility, combining marks, and Thai combinations, but stops short of encoding algorithms and glyph rendering.
- Examples
- Uses ASCII’s A, accented letters, common symbols, the Thai alphabet, Braille patterns, and Linear A.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate how characters, accents, writing systems, and visual glyphs occupy different roles in digital text.
Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition
Unicode is a character encoding standard that assigns code points to characters across writing systems.
- How it is used
- Provides a shared character standard for representing writing systems across languages and selecting compatible storage encodings.
- How deep it goes
- Defines Unicode’s purpose and UTF-8’s byte range, but stops short of explaining Unicode’s internal character assignments.
- Examples
- Uses umlauts, currency symbols, emojis, and binary decoded as ISO-8859-1 to contrast character coverage and encoding formats.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand why Unicode exists and choose UTF-8 as a default project encoding.
Read how Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition explains Unicode →
Related concepts
- code pointproduces · A code point is a numeric value assigned by a character-representation standard to identify an abstract character or symbol.
- UTF-8used by · UTF-8 is a variable-width Unicode encoding that represents each Unicode scalar value using one to four bytes and preserves ASCII byte representations.
- stringused by · A string is a programming-language value representing an ordered sequence of characters or character units as text.
- ASCIIalternative to · ASCII is a 7-bit character-encoding standard that assigns numeric codes to 128 basic Latin characters, symbols, punctuation marks, digits, and control characters.
- basic multilingual planehas part · The Basic Multilingual Plane is the Unicode plane containing code points from U+0000 through U+FFFF.
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