Unicode

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. A universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique code point to every character in every writing system -- 154,000+ characters across 168 scripts. UTF-8 (variable-length, ASCII-compatible) is the dominant encoding on the web (98%+). Common pitfalls: string length ≠ character count (emojis are multiple code points), case conversion is locale-dependent, and normalization matters for comparison.

    In plain English: The universal standard that gives every character in every language a unique number, making multilingual text work everywhere.

    Example: "The database stores UTF-8 but the legacy API returns Latin-1 -- the mojibake (garbled characters) is an encoding mismatch, not corrupt data."

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