For character encoding, programming languages adhere to a set of standards.
These standards serve as a representation of written languages and specify some requirements for encoding characters specific to those written languages.
Java follows the Unicode System character encoding standard, just like other programming languages.
This article provides information on the Java Unicode System.
What is a Java Unicode System?
A global standard called Unicode is used to encrypt 16-bit characters.
Almost every internationally recognized language can be represented using this technique.
Why Unicode System required?
There were various character encoding schemes in use prior to the creation of the Unicode system.
- ASCII
One of the first and most widely used standards for encoding characters is called ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It includes the letters A through Z in both uppercase and lowercase, numbers 0 through 9, as well as several fundamental symbols.
2. ISO 8859-1
The Western European language uses the ISO 8859-1 standard, which has 128 ASCII characters in addition to 128 other characters.
3. KOI-8
The KOI-8 standard, which was initially created for Russian, allows for the encoding of 8-bit letters and contains both the Latin and Russian alphabets (uppercase and lowercase both).
4. GB 18030 and BIG-5
Chinese-specific standards like GB 18030 and BIG-5 were created.
Big5 represents traditional Chinese characters, while GB18030 represents all 20,902 Han characters as well as additional DBCS symbols.
A specific code value was used to represent different characters in numerous languages in the aforementioned standards, which was a concern.
Additionally, there are longer character encodings for other languages, such as those that are 1 byte, 2 bytes, or longer.
Conclusion
A universal standard for character encoding of 16-bit characters is the Unicode system.
It was created as an answer to issues with previously created language standards.
Java makes advantage of a mechanism that can store two bytes for each character.
Therefore, the Unicode system for languages was created to address this issue.
In Java, each character uses two bytes since each character in this system holds two bytes.
