Unicode, in friendly terms: ASCII, UTF-8, code points, character encodings, and more

[luantranminh]

Data needs to be stored in storage (RAM, Disk ...) as bits (0,1)

ASCII maps basic Westen characters to numbers between 0 and 127.

5 characters -> 5 bytes

Unicode was born to handle the vast multitude of languages and complex things with accents, emojis, modifiers, and other strange characters.
Grapheme: a single unit of a human writing system (d or 华 or 🙀 ...).
Code points: one or more code points are combined to create a grapheme.

Different encoding

• UTF-32: each code point converts to binary with 4 bytes:
  • pros: same size for all characters -> easier to search, index
  • cons: waste space with simple characters
• UTF-8:
  • pros: ASCII compatibility backward, save space
  • cons: harder to index because of unequal sizes and bytes