Unicode is a character encoding standard that aims to provide a consistent representation of characters used in most of the world’s languages. It supports the representation of diverse writing systems and is designed to enable the exchange of text across different computer systems and platforms.
What is the reason for Java’s utilization of the Unicode System?
Java uses the Unicode system to provide a universal character encoding standard that supports most of the world’s written languages. Before Unicode, there were many language standards in use, such as ASCII for the United States, ISO 8859-1 for Western European languages, KOI-8 for Russian, GB18030, and BIG-5 for Chinese, and many more. The use of these disparate encoding standards made it difficult to develop software that could handle text in different languages and caused problems with interoperability between different systems.
Problems:
Java uses the Unicode system because, before its implementation, many language standards caused two main problems. Firstly, a particular code value corresponded to different letters in different language standards. This inconsistency made it difficult to represent text in multiple languages. Secondly, the encoding for languages with large character sets had a variable length, which made it difficult to handle text with different character lengths.
Solution:
A new language standard, the Unicode System, was developed to address the problems caused by the multiple language standards. The Unicode System uses a fixed 2-byte representation for characters, allowing each character to have a unique code value. Java also uses the Unicode System and characters in Java are represented using 2 bytes. The lowest value for a character in Java is ‘\u0000’, while the highest value is ‘\uFFFF’. This ensures that Java can handle and represent a vast range of characters from various written languages.
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