In-depth guides on Unicode, character encoding, and developer tools.
Unicode reserves certain ranges of code points as the Private Use Area (PUA) — regions where organizations and individuals can assign their own characters witho...
Combining characters are Unicode code points that attach to the preceding base character to modify its appearance. Rather than encoding every possible letter +...
Most writing systems read left-to-right, but Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and several other scripts read right-to-left. Text that mixes both directions — such as an...
Emoji may seem simple — colorful pictographs you tap on a phone — but their encoding in Unicode is surprisingly complex. Many emoji are single code points; othe...
Zero-width characters are Unicode code points that take up no horizontal space when rendered. They're invisible in most contexts yet can have significant effect...
Unicode allows some characters to be represented in multiple equivalent ways. The letter é, for instance, can be encoded as a single precomposed character (U+00...
Shift-JIS is a variable-width encoding for Japanese text developed by Microsoft and ASCII Corporation in 1982. It was designed to encode the tens of thousands o...
UTF-32 encodes every Unicode character in exactly 4 bytes — no variable-width complexity, no surrogate pairs, no multi-byte sequences. This simplicity comes at...
UTF-8 is now the dominant character encoding on the internet, used by over 98% of websites. But this dominance wasn't inevitable — it was the result of clever e...
Before Unicode, the computing world was fragmented. Different countries and vendors used different character sets, and software that worked in one locale often...
Mojibake (文字化け) is a Japanese term meaning "character transformation" — the garbled text that appears when a file encoded in one character set is decoded us...
ASCII — the American Standard Code for Information Interchange — was published in 1963 and defines 128 characters using 7-bit codes (0–127). It's one of the mos...