Unicode Inspector

Understanding Unicode Architecture

Every character in the Unicode standard is assigned an immutable hexadecimal number known as a code point (formatted as U+XXXX). For instance, the Euro symbol is U+20AC, which corresponds to decimal 8364.

UTF-8 is the dominant variable-length encoding of the web. Characters in the basic ASCII range require 1 byte, Western accented letters take 2 bytes, mathematical operators take 3 bytes, and emojis take 4 bytes. Read our breakdown on UTF-8 vs UTF-16 vs ASCII and our foundational overview on Unicode explained.

Notice two visually identical characters behaving differently in search? That is usually a precomposed (NFC) versus decomposed (NFD) mismatch — learn more in our guide on why search doesn't find accented names. If your text displays as an empty tofu rectangle instead of a glyph, see why fonts show boxes for missing glyphs.