Menu
What exactly are unicode character codes? And how are they different from ascii characters?
269
Unicode is a superset of ASCII, and the numbers 0–127 have the same meaning in ASCII as they have in Unicode.
ASCII has its equivalent in Unicode. The difference between ASCII and Unicode is that ASCII represents lowercase letters (a-z), uppercase letters (A-Z), digits (0-9) and symbols such as punctuation marks while Unicode represents letters of English, Arabic, Greek etc.
Unicode uses between 8 and 32 bits per character, so it can represent characters from languages from all around the world. It is commonly used across the internet. As it is larger than ASCII, it might take up more storage space when saving documents.
Unicode is a way to assign unique numbers (called code points) to characters from nearly all languages in active use today, plus many other characters such as mathematical symbols. There are many ways to encode Unicode strings as bytes, such as UTF-8 and UTF-16.
ASCII assigns values only to 128 characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, space, some punctuation, and some control characters).
For every character that has an ASCII value, the Unicode code point and the ASCII value of that character are the same.
In most modern applications you should prefer to use Unicode strings rather than ASCII. This will for example allow you to have users with accented characters in their name or address, and to localize your interface to languages other than English.
109
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
