Unicode Explained

• The files are in UTF-8 encoding, except NamesList.txt, which is ISO-8859-1. How-

ever, characters outside the ASCII range (Basic Latin block) appear in comments

only, except when noted otherwise in the description of the file. Thus, in most

cases, you can view and process the files as if they were ASCII encoded, at least if

you ignore the comments.

• A comment starts with # and ends at the end of line. A comment does not belong

to the data itself but describes it.

• One line corresponds to one logical record, typically specifying the value of a

property for one character.

• Fields of a record are separated by semicolons. In some files, there is a semicolon

after the last field, too. When the fields are referred to in text, they are considered

as numbered starting from zero—as common in programming, since programming

language designers think in terms of displacements from a base address.

• Leading and trailing spaces in a field are not significant.

• The first field of a record usually indicates a code point or code point range. The

other fields specify property values for the code point(s).

• Code points are expressed in the usual hexadecimal notation but without the “U+”

prefix, using at least four digits for a code number, with leading zeros as necessary.

• A code point range is described by writing two periods (..) between code points

—e.g., 0000..007F.

• However, in the UnicodeData.txt ...