How deeply does Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition cover Unicode?

Defines Unicode’s purpose and UTF-8’s byte range, but stops short of explaining Unicode’s internal character assignments.

Unicode

As explained in Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition

Unicode is a character encoding standard that assigns code points to characters across writing systems.

Unicode is an international encoding standard designed to provide characters for any language. It grew out of the limits of ASCII and ISO-8859-1: 128 or 256 characters could not cover the world’s writing systems. Unicode includes 149,186 characters in version 15, including more than 1,000 emojis. section 7.6

Unicode is the standard, not the particular byte format used to store it. UTF-8 is the most popular Unicode encoding and uses a variable number of bytes—one to four, or 8 to 32 bits—per character. For a project, UTF-8 is presented as a good default choice. section 7.6 section 7.7

Why older encodings were not enough

ASCII could not represent characters such as ü, ö, £, or ¥. ISO-8859-1 expanded the range from 128 to 256 characters, but countries then created separate encodings for their own languages. Unicode resolved this fragmented situation by aiming to cover characters across languages. section 7.6

How Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition covers it

Cover of Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition

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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.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.