Unicode System

Unicode is a universal international standard character encoding that is capable of representing most of the world's written languages.

Why java uses Unicode System?      

Before Unicode, there were many language standards:

Ø  ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) for the United States.

Ø  ISO 8859-1 for Western European Language.

Ø  KOI-8 for Russian.

Problem

This caused two problems:

1.     A particular code value corresponds to different letters in the various language standards.

2.    . The encodings for languages with large character sets have variable length.Some common characters are encoded as single bytes, other require two or more byte.

Solution

To solve these problems, a new language standard was developed i.e. Unicode System.

In unicode, character holds 2 byte, so java also uses 2 byte for characters.

lowest value:\u0000

highest value:\uFFFF