Resources

• Beej's Guide to C Programming: Unicode, Wide Characters, and All That
• Unicode Encoding! UTF-32, UCS-2, UTF-16, & UTF-8!
• Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile
• Everything that you need to know about Unicode and UTF-8

Unicode

Unicode is a standard for consistent encoding representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. At the end is a table that matches a letter/emoji/character/symbol to a number, this number is called code point.

Multibyte Characters

A multibyte character will mean a character whose encoding requires more than 1 byte. Usual strings (array of chars) are made of multibyte characters, making a multibyte string

Wide Characters

A wide character is a computer character datatype that generally has a size greater than the traditional 8-bit (1-byte) character.

Encodings

Encoding tells us how to represent a code point in memory. There are many Unicode encoding:

• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• UTF-32

UTF-8

• If it's smaller or equal than 7-bits: Start with 0s until 8-bits.
  • Example: Character ! has code point 33, then it would be 00100001
• If its larger than 7-bits:
  • Start with as many 1s as how many bytes you need, including the one where you put those 1s, then add a 0
  • For every byte after the first, start with 10
  • Add 0s as needed to fill up enough bits for a byte
  • Example: Character £ has code point 163, then it would be 11000010 10100011