You’ll find the inside information below incredibly useful at helping you tackle Unicode code points but there are a host of “automatic converters” that you might want to take advantage of online as well (almost all of the best ones being open-source and free of charge, too). If you’re working with aweb host like BlueHost, or using a CMS like WordPress, then this conversion process is already taken care of for you.

By the time you’re done with the details below you’ll knowexactly how to:

• Understand the overall conceptual point of character encodings and the numbering system in Unicode
• How Unicode has built-in support for numbering systems through different INT literals
• How to take advantage of built-in functions that are specifically designed to “play nicely” with character encodings and different numbering systems

Let’s dig right in.

What exactly is character encoding to begin with?

To start things off you have to understand exactly whatcharacter encoding is to begin with, which can be a bit of a tall taskconsidering the fact that there are hundreds of character encodings that youcan deal with as a programmer throughout your career.

One of the very simplest character encodings is ASCII sothat’s going to be the fundamental standpoint that we work with throughout thisquick example. Relatively small and including contained encoding you aren’tgoing to have to worry about a whole lot of headache or hassle wrapping yourhead around this process but will be able to use the fundamentals here in anyother character encoding you do later down the line.

ASCII encompasses:

• All lowercase English letters as well as all uppercase English letters
• Most traditional punctuation and symbols you’ll find on a keyboard
• Whitespace markers
• And even some non-printable characters

All of these inputs can be translated from traditionalcharacters that we are able to see and read in our own native language (ifyou’re working in English, anyways) to integers and inevitably into computerbits – each and every one of that can be encoded to a very unique and specificsequence of bits that do something very specific in the world of Unicode.

If every single character has its own specific code point(sometimes referred to as an integer) that means that different characters aresegmented into different code point ranges inside of the actual ASCII“language”.

In ASCII a code point range breakdown is as follows:

• 0 through 31 code points – These are your control or nonprintable characters
• 32 through 64 code points – These are your symbols, your numbers, and punctuation marks as well as whitespace
• 65 through 90 code points – These would be all of your uppercase English alphabet letters
• 91 through 96 code points – Graphemes that can include brackets and backslashes
• 97 through 122 code points – These are your lowercase English alphabet letters
• 123 through 126 code points – Ancillary graphemes
• Code point 127 – This is your Control point or the Delete key

All 128 of those individual characters encompass theentirety of the character set that is “understood” by the ASCII language. If acharacter is input into ASCII that isn’t included in the list we highlightedabove isn’t going to be expressed and it isn’t going to be understood based on thisencoding scheme.

How Bits Work

As we highlighted above, individual characters are going tobe converted into individual code points that are later expressed as integersand bits – the essential building block of all language and information that computersunderstand.

A bit is the expression of binary language, a signal thatyour computer understands because it only has one of two binary states. A bitis either a zero or a one, a “yes” or a “no”, a “true” or a “false”, and it’seither going to be “on” or it’s going to be “off”.

Because all the data that computers have to work with needsto be condensed down to its bare-bones and its most essential elements (bits)each and every one of those individual characters that may be input into theUnicode language has to be distilled down into decimal form.

As more decibels are added the binary form is expanded on,always looking for ways to express the information and data being conveyed inbinary form so that the computer can understand exactly what’s happening.

The problem with ASCII and the rise of Unicode

The reason that Unicode exists has a lot to do with the factthat ASCII as a computer language simply doesn’t have a large enough set ofcharacters to accommodate every other language in the world, unique dialects,and computers that are capable of working with and reading different symbolsand glyphs.

Truth be told, the biggest knock against ASCII has alwaysbeen that it doesn’t even have a large enough character set to accommodate theentirety of the English language, even.

This is where Unicode swings in to the scene.

Essentially acting as the same fundamental building blocklanguage that your computer can understand, Unicode is made up of a much larger(MUCH larger) set of individual code points.

There are technically a variety of different encodingschemes that can be taken advantage of when it comes to Unicode as well, eachof them with their own distinct code points, but the overwhelming majority offolks using Unicode are going to leverage UTF-8 (something that’s become a bitof a universal standard).

Unicode significantly expands on the traditional ASCIItable. Instead of being capable of handling 128 characters, though, Unicode canhandle 1,114,112 different characters – representing a significant upgrade thatallows for far more complexity and precision in a programming language.

At the same time, some argue that Unicode isn’t exactly andencoding specifically but instead is something more of an implementation of avariety of other character encodings. There’s a lot of nuance here that you mayor may not be interested in getting into (depending on how deep you want todive into the world of Unicode), but it’s important to know that there is adistinction between the two.

How to actually convert text into Unicode

If you are seriously interested in converting text intoUnicode the odds are very (VERY) good that you aren’t going to want to handlethe heavy lifting all on your own, simply because of the complexity that allthose individual characters and their encoding can represent.

Instead, you’ll want to take advantage of online conversiontools that allow you to input pretty much any character imaginable directlyinto this tool and have it immediately transform that character set (that veryspecific character set) into exact Unicode – almost always in UTF-8 butsometimes in UTF-16 or UTF-32, depending on what you are interested in.

These conversion tools are ridiculously easy to use and aslong as you are moving forward with conversion solutions from reputable sourcesyou shouldn’t have anything to worry about as far as accuracy, security, orsafety are concerned.

It sure beats having to try and figure out the binary codepoints of characters in Unicode manually!