Kodpunkt

Kodpunkt is a term used in Swedish and other Scandinavian languages to refer to a code point, the numerical value that identifies a specific character within a character set, most commonly Unicode.

In Unicode, a code point is written as U+ followed by hexadecimal digits. The valid range runs from 0 to 0x10FFFF, excluding the 0xD800–0xDFFF range that is reserved for UTF-16 surrogate pairs. The Basic Multilingual Plane covers 0x0000 to 0xFFFF; supplementary planes extend up to 0x10FFFF. For example, U+0041 represents the Latin capital letter A, while U+1F600 represents the grinning face emoji.

Code points are encoded into bytes by character encodings. UTF-8 uses a variable number of bytes per code point, UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes with surrogates, and UTF-32 uses a fixed 4 bytes. Rendering relies on fonts and glyphs that provide the shapes for each code point, while text processing must consider that a single user-perceived character (grapheme) may consist of multiple code points and combining marks.

Kodpunkt is a core concept in software development, typography, and linguistics, underpinning text storage, searching, comparison, and normalization. Understanding code points helps avoid problems with character data across languages and platforms.