What is Unicode?
Unicode provides
a unique number for every character,
no matter what the platform,
no matter what the program,
no matter what the language.
Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store
letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode
was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning
these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example,
the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its
languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was
adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.
These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That
is, two encodings can use the same number for two different characters,
or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer
(especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever
data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs
the risk of corruption.
