unicodecodepunt

A Unicode code point is the basic unit of information in the Unicode character set. It is a numeric value that uniquely identifies a character or a formatting symbol, independent of how the character is stored or displayed. Code points are defined by the Unicode Standard and are platform-, language-, and encoding-agnostic.

Code points are written in the form U+XXXX, using hexadecimal digits. For example, U+0041 denotes the Latin capital letter A, and U+1F600 denotes the grinning face emoji. The valid range for Unicode code points is from U+0000 to U+10FFFF. The range U+D800 to U+DFFF is reserved for UTF-16 surrogate pairs and is not used for independent code points.

In actual data, a code point is encoded in one of several Unicode Transformation Formats, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32. UTF-8 uses variable-length encoding (1 to 4 bytes); UTF-16 uses 16-bit units and may use surrogate pairs for supplementary code points; UTF-32 uses fixed 32-bit units. Not all sequences represent valid code points; some code points are reserved or unassigned, and there are rules for combining code points to form composed characters.

A code point is distinct from its rendered glyph. A single code point can map to multiple glyphs in different fonts, and several code points can combine to render a single visual character through normalization and combining marks.

Unicode code points are managed by the Unicode Consortium and form the basis for text encoding in modern software, ensuring consistent representation and interchange of characters across systems.