DEV Community

Cover image for Unicode Characters
PHP Error Code
PHP Error Code

Posted on • Originally published at phperrorcode.com

Unicode Characters

We are going to discuss Unicode. As we all know that computer understands the number language. It assigns every character a number that is how it works but unfortunately, the encoding method was only for English alphabets, so for other languages, it was difficult to understand if we write any other language alphabets or symbols so it prints a block or square type symbol which means nothing but strange.

Unicode Characters Table

These are the characters that we can use in place of the space key. It is a hidden space in your text, you can use it to send or type an invisible character unicode.

A list of a few Unicode and Characters is here at Unicode Characters.

UTF & It’s Types

The Unicode is called the universal standard for character encoding,

Unicode follows UTF the abbreviation of UTF is “Unicode Transformation Format”.

UTF defines how to represent Unicode code. UTF has 4 types which are explained below.

UFT-7

The UFT-7 was designed to show the ASCII codes. As we know ASCII works on 7 bits encoding so basically UTF-7 is used to show the ASCII in our emails and texts which use UTF-7.

UFT-8

The UTF-8 is the widely used scheme in encoding moreover UTF-8 has a special ability it can use almost 4 bits for showing characters.

Let’s see how it works:

It takes 1 byte for showing English Alphabet or symbols.
2 bytes for Latin or middle east alphabets or symbols.
3 bytes for Asian alphabets or symbols.
And 4 bytes for other special symbols.

UFT-16

The UTF-16 is an extension for encoding, UTF-16 is used to show 65536 characters and it is also supported by 4 bytes for showing special characters.

UFT-32

We can say UTF-32 is a multi-byte scheme for encoding it also supports bytes for showing special characters.

Top comments (0)