Unicode Character Set

Before talking about this particular character set we need to talk about what a character set is? Character Set is a set of symbols that represent a particular language or set of languages or can be anything one can rely on for his language representation.

Now knowing what a character set is we will talk about unicode character set. After the introduction of ASCII encoding for the common english character set which only required first 7bits of a byte, people started using the code points from 128 to 255 without any common standard. In fact few languages can't be even represented completely with one byte which ASCII was doing at that time. By the time internet got a boom and people started accessing one other's information the encoding became pretty important as the same code point represented differently in different computers as they had their own character encodings i.e. the mapping of characters to the code points. Hence to solve this, Unicode came up with a universal character set that contained almost all the writable characters in the world. And the best part is this was not restricted to only one byte or in fact any number of bytes to represent a character.