What is Unicode?

The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) or Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the world’s writing systems.

As an SMS MT feature, it allows any content to be sent within a message.

Unicode and ASCII are computer systems’ two most used character encoding schemes. While Unicode is used to exchange, process, and store text data in any language, ASCII is used to represent text in the form of symbols, numbers, and characters.

As of Version 15.0, Unicode contains 149,186 characters, but the answer is more complicated than that because of all the different kinds of characters that people might be interested in counting.

Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 contain the same characters at the exact location, but Unicode has rules and specifications outside the scope of ISO/IEC 10646. In other words, Unicode offers an extensive set of functional character specifications, data, algorithms, and background material that are not part of ISO/IEC 10646.

Unicode uses two encoding formats, 8-bit and 16-bit. The default encoding format is 16-bit, where each character is 16 bits wide (2 bytes), with the form usually shown as U+hhhh, where hhhh is the character’s hexadecimal code point.

For example, “Infobip” written in Unicode looks like: U+0049 U+006E U+0066 U+006F U+0062 U+0069 U+0070.