In-depth guides on Unicode, character encoding, and developer tools.
One of the most controversial decisions in Unicode's history is Han Unification: the assignment of a single code point to characters from Chinese, Japanese, Kor...
Control characters are non-printing code points that were originally designed to control hardware devices like printers and terminals. Many have been repurposed...
JavaScript's string handling has a quirk that surprises many developers: strings are sequences of UTF-16 code units, not Unicode code points. This is a legacy o...
One of the most significant changes in Python 3 was the strict separation of text (str) and bytes (bytes). In Python 2, strings were bytes with ambiguous encodi...
Choosing the right character encoding for your database is one of those decisions that's easy to get wrong and painful to fix later. The most notorious example...
Percent-encoding (also called URL encoding) is the mechanism for representing characters in URLs that are either not allowed by the URL specification or that ha...
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...