(Wikipedia)
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.
The standard consists of a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding method and set of standard character encodings, a set of reference data files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts). As of June 2015, the most recent version is Unicode 8.0. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium.
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