Unicode Converter - encoding / decoding

Unicode to Text

Unicode Converter helps you convert between Unicode character numbers, characters, UTF-8 and UTF-16 code units in hex, percent escapes,and Numeric Character References.

How to convert UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

1. Enter your text in the editor.
2. You will automatically get UTF bytes in each format.

What is Unicode?

Unicode is a character encoding system that assigns a code to every character and symbol in the world's languages.
Unicode is the only encoding system that ensures you may get or combine data using any combination of languages because no other encoding standard covers all languages. XML, Java, JavaScript, LDAP, and other web-based technologies all require Unicode.
UTF-8, a variable length encoding method in which one represents each written symbol- to four-byte code, and UTF-16, a fixed width encoding scheme in which a two-byte code represents each written symbol, are the two most prevalent Unicode implementations for computer systems.

Why Use Unicode?

Unicode can handle data in a variety of scripts, including French, Japanese, and Hebrew. Before Unicode was introduced, a computer could only process and show the written symbols on its operating system code page, which was connected to a single script.
For example, a computer that can handle French will not be able to process Japanese or Hebrew.

UTF Encoding Forms

Unicode characters are encoded in one of three ways: a 32-bit form (UTF-32), a 16-bit form (UTF-16), or an 8-bit form (UTF-8) (UTF-8).
The identification of each character and its numeric value (code position) is defined by these character encoding standards and how they are represented in bits.
 

Code Points vs. Code Units 

• Code points are numbers that represent Unicode characters. "A code point is the atomic unit of information. Text is a sequence of code points. Each code point is a number which is given meaning by the Unicode standard."
• Code units are numbers that encode code points to store or transmit Unicode text. One or more code units encode a single code point. Each code unit has the same size, which depends on the encoding format that is used. The most popular format, UTF-8, has 8-bit code units.

What are Unicode encodings UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32?

We now know that Unicode is an international standard that encodes every known character to a unique number. But, how do we move these unique numbers around the internet? Transmission is achieved using bytes of information.

UTF-8: Every code point is encoded using one, two, three, or four bytes in UTF-8. It is ASCII backward compatible. All English characters use only one byte, which is exceptionally efficient. If we're sending non-English characters, we'll merely need more bytes.  It is the most used type of encoding, and Python 3 uses it by default. The default encoding in Python 2 is ASCII (unfortunately).
UTF-16 UTF-16 has a variable length of 2 or 4 bytes. Because most Asian text can be encoded in two bytes each, this encoding is ideal for it. It isn't very good for English since every English character requires two bytes..
UTF-32 is fixed 4 bytes. All characters are encoded in 4 bytes, so it needs a lot of memory. It is not used very often. 

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