Unicode
termThe standard that gives every character of every writing system a number, a name and a set of properties; version 18.0 counts 172,808 characters.
Unicode is the catalogue, not the bytes: a code point such as U+00E9 becomes bytes only through an encoding form, almost always UTF-8. Most text bugs a network engineer meets live in the gap between the two: lengths counted in different units, characters that draw as nothing, letters from another script that look identical, and bytes read in the wrong charset. Each version adds characters, so software with older data may not know a character that newer text contains.
Also known as: unicode standard