Unicode HOWTO — Definitions

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions). Today's programs need to be able to handle a wide variety of characters. Applications are often internationalized to display messages and output in a variety of user-selectable languages; the same program might need to output an error message in English, French, Japanese, Hebrew, or Russian. Web content can be written in any of these languages and can also include a variety of emoji symbols. Python's string type uses the Unicode Standard for representing characters, which lets Python programs work with all these different possible characters. Unicode ( is a specification that aims to list every character used by human languages and give each character its own unique code. The Unicode specifications are continually revised and updated to add new languages and symbols. A character is the smallest possible component of a text. 'A', 'B', 'C', etc., are all different characters. So are 'È' and 'Í'. Characters vary depending on the language or context you're talking about. For example, there's a character for "Roman Numeral One", 'Ⅰ', that's separate from the uppercase letter 'I'. They'll usually look the same, but these are two different characters that have different meanings. The Unicode standard describes how characters are represented by code points. A code point value is an integer in the range 0 to 0x10FFFF (about 1.1 million values, the actual number assigned < is less than that). In the standard and in this document, a code point is written using the notation U+265E to mean the character with value 0x265e (9,822 in decimal). The Unicode standard contains a lot of tables listing characters and their corresponding code points Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically): ```none 0061 'a'; LATIN SMALL LETTER A 0062 'b'; LATIN SMALL LETTER B 0063 'c'; LATIN SMALL LETTER C ... 007B '{'; LEFT CURLY BRACKET ... 2167 'Ⅷ'; ROMAN NUMERAL EIGHT 2168 'Ⅸ'; ROMAN NUMERAL NINE ... 265E '♞'; BLACK CHESS KNIGHT 265F '♟'; BLACK CHESS PAWN ... 1F600 '😀'; GRINNING FACE 1F609 '😉'; WINKING FACE ... ``` … Attribution: Adapted from Python Documentation under PSF-2.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, retained only bounded code excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.