Unicode
Unicode is a worldwide character-encoding standard. .NET use it exclusively at the system level for character and string manipulation. Unicode simplifies localization of software and improves multilingual text processing. Because Unicode is inherent to .NET, you enable your application with universal data exchange capabilities for global marketing, using a single binary file for every possible character code. Unicode provides several functions:
- defines the semantics for each character
- standardizes script behavior
- provides a standard algorithm for bidirectional text
- defines cross-mappings to other standards
Supported languages include, but are not limited to, German, French, English, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese. Among the scripts supported by Unicode are Latin, Greek, Han, Hiragana, and Katakana.
Unicode has replaced ASCII as the base character set for the *CHAR, *STRING, and *ONECHAR data types.