From the course: Localization for Developers

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Converting to Unicode

Converting to Unicode

From the course: Localization for Developers

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Converting to Unicode

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- Text can be encoded in many different ways. Let's look at a bit of history. Back in the 1960s, the ASCII standard was used to encode text. As a seven-bit encoding, it had space for 128 different characters, including control characters for communicating with computers and printers. It was heavily slanted towards English, though, and didn't include any special characters. Fast forward into the 1990s. Most computers favored using eight-bit encodings. Most computers in the West used some variety of the Latin-1 standard, which as adopted by the International Standards Organization as ISO Standard 8859-1. ISO 8859-1 had 191 displayable characters, reserving the remaining 65 places for use as control characters, things like "new line," "move left," and "bell." This allowed the inclusion of the accented versions of existing characters and the addition of a few completely foreign characters. 191 characters was enough to add full support for 29 languages, mostly European, but it only had…

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