Unicode System
| Unicode is a universal international standard character encoding that is capable of representing most of the world’s written languages. |
Why java uses Unicode System?| Before Unicode, there were many language standards: | - ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) for the United States.
- ISO 8859-1 for Western European Language.
- KOI-8 for Russian.
- GB18030 and BIG-5 for chinese, and so on.
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ProblemThis caused two problems:- A particular code value corresponds to different letters in the various language standards.
- The encodings for languages with large character sets have variable length.Some common characters are encoded as single bytes, other require two or more byte.
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Solution| To solve these problems, a new language standard was developed i.e. Unicode System. | | In unicode, character holds 2 byte, so java also uses 2 byte for characters. | | lowest value:u0000 | | highest value:uFFFF |
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