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.
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…
Unicode Normalisation: NFC, NFD, NFKC, and NFKD Explained
Unicode allows the same visual character to be represented by multiple distinct sequences of code points. The letter é can be stored as a si…
Control Characters: The Hidden Unicode Code Points
The first 32 code points in Unicode (U+0000–U+001F) and code point U+007F are control characters—inherited directly from ASCII and the older…
Currency Symbols in Unicode: A Complete Reference
Unicode contains over 60 currency symbols, from the ubiquitous dollar sign to obscure historical currencies. Using the correct Unicode symbo…
Mathematical Characters in Unicode
Unicode contains a rich collection of mathematical symbols, operators, and alphanumeric characters spread across several blocks. Whether you…
Right-to-Left Text in Unicode: Arabic, Hebrew, and Beyond
Unicode supports writing systems that run right-to-left (RTL), including Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Thaana, Syriac, and several others. Handli…