contributed by Mushtaq Ahmad
Unicode is international standard for encoding, representation and handling of text symbols of all major languages used around the world. It was developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard (UCS) and has now replaced ASCII as the most widely used character encoding scheme. It covers details such as enumeration properties (uppercase, lowercase, etc.), character properties, rules for collation, rendering, bidirectional display (e.g. Arabic is written right-to-left), normalization and much more.

The Unicode Consortium has developed Unicode Transformation Scheme (UTF) which is a family of standards for encoding Unicode character set into binary. it has developed UTF-8 and UTF-16. UTF-8 is 8-bit encoding so it covers all ASCII characters and symbols used in European languages. UTF-16 is 16 bit so its takes twice the memory to represent the same character but it can also represent a much larger number of characters. It is also incompatible with ASCII.

Today Unicode is supported by all major programming languages and database systems.