Unicode Need For Unicode




Unicode Need For Unicode

As computers become a popular tool for doing all kinds of data processing across the world, their usage could not be limited to English language users only. Hence, people started developing computer systems that could not allow interaction and processing of data in local languages of users (e.g., Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) This required support of local language characters and other language-specific symbols on these computer systems. ASCII or EBCDIC did not have enough number of bits to accommodate all the characters and language-specific symbols of a local language, in addition to English alphabet characters and special characters. Hence, different encoding systems were designed to cater to this requirement local languages. In the process, hundreds of different encoding systems came into existence. Although, this looked fine initially, it later led to a chaotic state of affairs due to following reasons:

No single encoding system had enough bits and an adequate mechanism to support characters of all types of languages used in the world. Hence, supporting of characters from multiple languages on a single computer system became a tedious job since it required supporting of multiple encoding systems on the computer. With hundreds of different encoding systems in use across the world, it became almost impossible to support all of them on a single system.

Different encoding systems development independently of each other obviously conflicted with one another. That is, two encoding systems often used the same code for two different characters or used different codes for the same character. Due to this problem, whenever data transfer took place between computer systems or software using different encoding systems the data was at the risk of corruption.

As a result, it became difficult to exchange text files internationally. The Unicode standard was designed to overcome these problems. It is a universal character-encoding standard used for representation of text for computer processing. states that it is an encoding that "provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language".