Unicodes

For a detailed description of all aspects of Unicode, refer to The Unicode Standard.

Unicode is a worldwide character-encoding standard. Windows NT and its successors—Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista use it exclusively at the system level for character and string manipulation. Windows 95/98/Me can also run Unicode-based Windows applications that are designed with the limited support for Unicode on those systems in mind or that use the Microsoft Layer for Unicode (see Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/Me Systems).

Compared to older ways of handling character and string data, Unicode simplifies localization of software and improves multilingual text processing. By using Unicode to represent character and string data in your applications, you can enable those applications with universal data exchange capabilities for global marketing, using a single binary file for every possible character code.

Unicode allows any combination of characters, drawn from any combination of scripts and languages, to co-exist in a single document.
Unicode defines semantics for each character.
Unicode standardizes script behavior.
Unicode provides a standard algorithm for bidirectional text.
Unicode defines cross-mappings to other standards.
Unicode defines multiple encodings of its single character set: UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. Conversion of data among these encodings is lossless.
Unicode supports numerous scripts used by languages around the world, and also a large number of technical symbols and special characters used in publishing. The supported scripts include, but are not limited to, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Han, Hangul, Hiragana, and Katakana. Supported languages include, but are not limited to, German, French, English, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Unicode currently can represent the vast majority of characters in modern computer use around the world, and continues to be updated to make it even more complete.

This is an excerpt from a page in the Microsoft website. If you wish to learn more about Unicode please browse to Unicode.