Articles & Guides
In-depth guides on Unicode, character encoding, HTML entities, emoji, and international text. Whether you're trying to understand UTF-8, demystify emoji sequences, or learn how confusable characters work — these articles have you covered.
Dingbats and Symbols: Unicode's Decorative Characters
Long before emoji, designers and typographers used dingbats—decorative symbols, ornaments, and pictographs—to add visual interest to printed…
Unicode in URLs: Internationalized Domain Names Explained
The Domain Name System was designed for ASCII. Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) extend it to support non-ASCII characters, allowing dom…
CJK Unified Ideographs: The Largest Unicode Block
The CJK Unified Ideographs block (U+4E00–U+9FFF) is the largest single block in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane, containing 20,902 Han …
Greek and Coptic: Ancient Alphabets in Unicode
The Greek alphabet is one of the most influential writing systems in human history—the ancestor of Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, and Gothic scr…
Box Drawing Characters and Block Elements in Unicode
Before modern UI frameworks, terminal-based applications drew their interfaces using box drawing characters—a set of Unicode characters spec…
How to Display Any Unicode Character in HTML
Every Unicode character—all 154,000+ assigned code points—can be displayed in a web page. The method you choose depends on whether the chara…
Unicode Private Use Area: Custom Characters for Your Application
Unicode reserves specific ranges of code points as Private Use Areas (PUAs)—code points that have no standard meaning and can be assigned an…
Emoji Sequences and Presentation Selectors
Not all emoji are single code points—many are sequences of multiple code points that rendering engines combine into a single visible glyph. …
Unicode Support in JavaScript, Python, and Other Languages
Every major programming language claims Unicode support, but the implementation details vary significantly. The choice of internal string re…
The Supplementary Multilingual Plane: Ancient Scripts and More
Plane 1—the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP)—is where Unicode stores historic scripts, specialised symbols, and the vast majority of e…
Combining Characters and Diacritics in Unicode
Combining characters are Unicode code points that attach to the preceding base character to form a composite glyph. Diacritical marks—accent…
Bidirectional Text Attacks: How Unicode Spoofing Works
In late 2021, security researchers disclosed Trojan Source—a class of attack that uses Unicode bidirectional control characters to make sour…