**What is Unicode?**
Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that aims to represent every character from all writing systems in the world. The core idea behind Unicode is to assign a unique number, called a "code point," to each character, ensuring that computers can display text accurately across different languages and platforms without any issues like character corruption or garbled text.
Each code point starts at 0 and is represented in hexadecimal format, usually prefixed with "U+". For example, U+0000 represents the null character, which has no visible form but is used in programming contexts. This system allows for a vast range of characters, including letters, symbols, emojis, and even ancient scripts.
As of the latest version, Unicode 15.0 (as of 2023), it includes over 149,000 characters. Of these, a significant portion comes from East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. For instance, the Chinese character for "good" (好) is represented by the code point U+597D.
Unicode is divided into multiple planes, each containing up to 65,536 (2^16) characters. The first plane, known as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), covers the most commonly used characters and ranges from U+0000 to U+FFFF. Other planes, like the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), are used for less common or more specialized characters.
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**What is JavaScript?**
JavaScript is a high-level, interpreted programming language primarily used for creating dynamic content on web pages. It is a versatile language that supports object-oriented, functional, and imperative programming styles. JavaScript runs in web browsers and is often used alongside HTML and CSS to build interactive user interfaces.
Originally developed by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995, JavaScript was designed to be easy to use and integrate with web technologies. Despite its name, it has little in common with Java, and its syntax is more similar to languages like Self and Scheme. Over time, JavaScript has evolved significantly, becoming one of the most widely used programming languages on the internet.
To ensure consistency and portability, JavaScript was standardized under ECMA International as ECMAScript. Today, it powers not only front-end development but also back-end applications through environments like Node.js. Its flexibility and wide support make it an essential tool for modern web developers.
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**UTF-32 and UTF-8**
While Unicode defines the code points for characters, it doesn't specify how those code points should be stored or transmitted. That's where encoding methods come into play. One such method is UTF-32, which uses four bytes to represent each code point. This makes it straightforward and efficient for searching, but it's very space inefficient—especially for text that uses mostly ASCII characters.
For example, the code point U+0000 would be stored as 0x00000000, and U+597D (the character "好") would be 0x0000597D. However, since most web content is in English, using UTF-32 would result in a fourfold increase in file size compared to ASCII, making it impractical for most applications.
This led to the development of UTF-8, a more efficient encoding method. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding where common characters (like those in ASCII) are represented using just one byte, while less common ones use two, three, or even four bytes. This makes it highly space-efficient and ideal for the web. Because of this, UTF-8 is now the dominant encoding used on the internet, supported by virtually all modern browsers and systems.
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