Unicode

Over time ASCII Extended became too limiting and we created a new character set called Unicode. All computers worldwide are capable of using the Unicode character set. Unicode can get quite complicated, but to keep it simple for the exam, we’ll say each character uses 16 bits and we can represent around 65,000 characters The first 256 characters in Unicode match those in ASCII and ASCII Extended to maintain backward compatibility.

Benefits of Unicode

• Contains a large number of the worlds symbols.
• Almost all devices can decode text sent to them using Unicode.
• Backwards compatible with ASCII (the first 128 characters use the same unique binary numbers!)
• Contains emoji