An extension of ASCII encoding. However, it is not limited to only 8 bits to represent characters. ASCII is not able to display Chinese. Unicode uses 16bits. Nothing truly genius, but it gets the job done. There is only one unicode character set. Your unicode is the same as mine
Structure
- The first 128 Unicode characters are ASCII
- The second 128 Unicode characters are ISO extensions to ASCII
- Other character sets are spaced out similar to their pre-made conventions.
Difference From DBC
Double byte character set uses 2 bytes. Unicode does not use 2 bytes, it uses one wide byte. They both take 16bits per character. But characters in Unicode are treated only as 16bit. 8bit values in Unicode mean nothing.
UTF-8
Ability to turn a unicode character into 4 bytes. This allows it to be compatible with ASCII which only reads bytes.