Definition
Unicode is an international standard for representing text characters. Unicode supports the scripts of most languages in wide use and has a flexible design that is capable of supporting all known human languages and all of their variant scripts. The development of the Unicode standard is coordinated by the Unicode Consortium.
Key Points
Unicode’s development is motivated by the need to encode characters in all languages without conflicts between the encodings for different languages. Obviously, the achievement of this goal is fraught with technical and political complexities.
Unicode has several different encodings. The most widely used is the 8-bit, variable-width UTF-8 encoding, which permits the encoding of many European languages in an efficient one-byte form and is backward compatible with both the ASCII and ISO-8859-1 character sets. UTF-16 is a 16-bit, variable-width encoding that is more suitable to languages with many characters, such as Chinese, Japanese and...
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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Munson, E. (2009). Unicode. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_5045
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_5045
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-35544-3
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