Learn Unicode Over Lx Pct Of The Web
Computers shop every slice of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a issue to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ together with 62 stands for ‘b’ inwards the ASCII encoding, which was launched inwards 1963. Before the web, reckoner systems were siloed, together with at that topographic point were hundreds of unlike encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could hateful whatever of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you lot brought a file from 1 reckoner to another, it could come upwards out every bit gobbledygook.
Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Standard Arabic (العربية), together with fifty-fifty emoji symbols similar
or
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, at that topographic point wasn’t fifty-fifty plenty room for all the English linguistic communication punctuation (like curly quotes), spell Unicode has room for over a 1 thou 1000 characters. Unicode was showtime published inwards 1991, coincidentally the twelvemonth the WWW debuted—little did anyone realize at the fourth dimension they would last together with then of import for each other. Today, people tin easily percentage documents on the web, no affair what their language.
Every January, nosotros expect at the pct of the webpages inwards our index that are inwards unlike encodings. Here’s what our information looks similar alongside the latest figures*:
As you lot tin see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase inwards “market share” since 2006. Note that nosotros split upwards out ASCII ( sixteen percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you lot include ASCII, nearly lxxx percent of spider web documents are inwards Unicode (UTF-8). The to a greater extent than documents that are inwards Unicode, the less probable you lot volition run across mangled characters (what Japanese telephone telephone mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.
We’ve long used Unicode every bit the internal format for all the text Google searches together with process: whatever other encoding is showtime converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 only released alongside over 110,000 characters; before long we’ll last updating to that version together with to Unicode’s locale information from CLDR 21 (both via ICU). The continued rising inwards operate of Unicode makes it fifty-fifty easier to exercise the processing for the many languages that nosotros cover. Without it, our unified index it would last nearly impossible—it’d last a fleck similar non existence able to convert betwixt the hundreds of currencies inwards the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to aid people disclose information inwards almost whatever language.
Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Standard Arabic (العربية), together with fifty-fifty emoji symbols similar
or 
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, at that topographic point wasn’t fifty-fifty plenty room for all the English linguistic communication punctuation (like curly quotes), spell Unicode has room for over a 1 thou 1000 characters. Unicode was showtime published inwards 1991, coincidentally the twelvemonth the WWW debuted—little did anyone realize at the fourth dimension they would last together with then of import for each other. Today, people tin easily percentage documents on the web, no affair what their language. Every January, nosotros expect at the pct of the webpages inwards our index that are inwards unlike encodings. Here’s what our information looks similar alongside the latest figures*:
*Your mileage may vary: these figures may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. The graph lumps together encodings yesteryear script. We honour the encoding for each webpage; the ASCII pages only incorporate ASCII characters, for example. Thanks over again to Erik van der Poel for collecting the data.
As you lot tin see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase inwards “market share” since 2006. Note that nosotros split upwards out ASCII ( sixteen percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you lot include ASCII, nearly lxxx percent of spider web documents are inwards Unicode (UTF-8). The to a greater extent than documents that are inwards Unicode, the less probable you lot volition run across mangled characters (what Japanese telephone telephone mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.
We’ve long used Unicode every bit the internal format for all the text Google searches together with process: whatever other encoding is showtime converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 only released alongside over 110,000 characters; before long we’ll last updating to that version together with to Unicode’s locale information from CLDR 21 (both via ICU). The continued rising inwards operate of Unicode makes it fifty-fifty easier to exercise the processing for the many languages that nosotros cover. Without it, our unified index it would last nearly impossible—it’d last a fleck similar non existence able to convert betwixt the hundreds of currencies inwards the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to aid people disclose information inwards almost whatever language.