C# for Programmers, Second Edition

E. Unicode^®

Objectives

In this appendix you will learn:

• Unicode fundamentals.

• The mission of the Unicode Consortium.

• The design basis of Unicode.

• The three Unicode encoding forms: UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32.

• Characters and glyphs.

• The advantages and disadvantages of using Unicode.

Outline

E.1 Introduction

E.2 Unicode Transformation Formats

E.3 Characters and Glyphs

E.4 Advantages/Disadvantages of Unicode

E.5 Using Unicode

E.6 Character Ranges

E.1 Introduction

The use of inconsistent character encodings (i.e., numeric values associated with characters) in the developing of global software products causes serious problems, because computers process information as numbers. For instance, the character “a” is converted to a numeric value ...