UnicodeCodepunkten

UnicodeCodepunkten are the numeric identifiers assigned to characters in the Unicode standard. Each code point is an abstract unit used to uniquely identify a character, independent of how that character is stored or rendered. They are written in the form U+XXXX, with additional digits for higher code points (for example, U+1F600).

The Unicode code space ranges from U+0000 to U+10FFFF and is divided into 17 planes. The Basic Multilingual Plane covers U+0000 to U+FFFF. Points above U+FFFF belong to supplementary planes. Some code points are assigned to characters, while others are reserved, non-characters, or allocated for private use.

Code points are encoded into bytes by encoding forms such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. UTF-8 uses one to four bytes per code point; UTF-16 uses surrogate pairs for code points above U+FFFF; UTF-32 encodes each code point as a single 32-bit value. The encoding form chosen determines how code points are stored and transmitted.

In source code and data formats, UnicodeCodepunkten are referenced directly or via escapes, for example U+0041 for the Latin letter A, or language-specific escapes like \u0041 in many programming languages and 😀 in HTML.

Understanding code points is essential for text processing, normalization, rendering, and internationalization, and clarifies the distinction between a character (an abstract symbol) and a glyph or visual representation.

See also Unicode, code point concept, surrogate pair, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32.