What is Unicode?

Unicode is a universal encoding aimed at representing all known symbols such that a single encoding can be used for any country/language. Unicode is widely adopted and most computer systems use it internally to store character strings: the Windows operating system (and file system) uses this encoding as well as most Unix/Linux systems. Programming environments like Java or .NET are also based on Unicode.

Note that in China the GB18030 encoding is preferred to Unicode: this is a universal encoding published by the Chinese National Standard.