Unicode Explained

<script type="text/javascript">

var message = "I \u2665 Unicode! \u263A";

alert(message);

document.write(message);

</script>

If

you view an HTML document containing such a script element, you should see the

text “I ♥ Unicode! ☺” appear in your HTML document, provided of course that you

use a JavaScript-enabled browser. Whether you see the characters properly depends

on the font in use. You should also see the same text appear in a small pop-up window,

since that’s what the alert function does. However, the font that a browser uses in

such windows is often different from the default font it uses for web pages. This may

mean that the special characters are not visible, but small boxes might appear instead.

The font used in pop-up windows is under the control of the browser and the operating

system and cannot be affected by the document author in any normal way. Thus, avoid

special characters in pop-ups.

PHP: Mostly Just 8 Bits

The PHP language, commonly used in web authoring, operates on 8-bit characters only.

This applies to PHP 5, too. To get some Unicode support, you need to use the string

functions utf8_encode and utf8_decode, which convert from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 and

vice versa. See http://www.php.net/utf8_encode for their usage. Character and string

constants in PHP closely follow the Perl model.

An HTML document created by PHP can, however, contain any Unicode characters,

since you can express ...