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The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (plus amendments to that standard), which is the basis of many character encodings, improving as characters from previously unrepresented writing systems are added.
Microsoft was one of the first companies to implement Unicode in their products. Windows NT was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in system calls.Using the (now obsolete) UCS-2 encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to the variable-width encoding UTF-16 starting with Windows 2000, allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs.
UTF-16 arose from an earlier obsolete fixed-width 16-bit encoding now known as UCS-2 (for 2-byte Universal Character Set), [2] [3] once it became clear that more than 2 16 (65,536) code points were needed, [4] including most emoji and important CJK characters such as for personal and place names.
The Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 jointly collaborate on the list of the characters in the Universal Coded Character Set.The Universal Coded Character Set, most commonly called the Universal Character Set (abbr. UCS, official designation: ISO/IEC 10646), is an international standard to map characters, discrete symbols used in natural language, mathematics, music, and other ...
The numbers in the names of the encodings indicate the number of bits per code unit (for UTF encodings) or the number of bytes per code unit (for UCS encodings and UTF-1). UTF-8 and UTF-16 are the most commonly used encodings. UCS-2 is an obsolete subset of UTF-16; UCS-4 and UTF-32 are functionally equivalent. UTF encodings include:
To encode characters outside of the BMP (unreachable in plain UCS-2), such as Emoji, UTF-16 uses surrogate pairs, which when decoded with UCS-2 would appear as two valid but unmapped code points. A single SMS GSM message using this encoding can have at most 70 characters (140 octets).
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (July 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article compares Unicode encodings in two types of environments: 8-bit clean environments, and environments that forbid the use of byte values with the ...
In order to include these missing characters the 16-bit UTF-16 (in GSM called UCS-2) encoding may be used at the price of reducing the length of a (non-segmented) message from 160 to 70 characters. The messages in Chinese, Korean or Japanese languages must be encoded using the UTF-16 character encoding.