About unicode character lookup
Unicode gives every character in every writing system a unique number, called a code point. The lookup shows the code point and how the character is stored and written in code.
What you will see
- Code point, such as U+0915 for the Devanagari letter क.
- UTF-8 and UTF-16 bytes, which are how files and strings store it.
- An HTML entity and a JavaScript escape sequence you can paste into code.
Why it helps
Debugging garbled text, finding the right escape for a symbol and understanding why one visible character takes more than one byte.
A worked example
The Devanagari letter क has the code point U+0915. In UTF-8 it takes three bytes, E0 A4 95, and in UTF-16 one unit, 0915. In HTML it can be written क and in JavaScript as \u0915.
Tips
- A single visible character can be several code points, such as a letter plus an accent.
- Normalise text before comparing it, since two forms can look identical.
