ITPEC IP April 2024 Question 3
Which of the following is a standard encoding system that is widely used for handling multilingual text and symbols around the world as a single character set?
Explanation
Unicode — one character set that gives every character of the world's scripts, and many symbols, a code of its own.
Unicode assigns a single code point to each character, whether Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or an emoji, so text that mixes several languages fits in one character set. The code points are stored as bytes by encoding forms such as UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32; UTF-8 is the usual form on the web.
Answer (d)
Why not others:
- •(a) ASCII — a 7-bit code of 128 characters: English letters, digits, punctuation and control codes, with no other scripts
- •(b) EBCDIC — an 8-bit code IBM defined for its mainframes, a single-byte set of letters, digits and symbols rather than a multilingual one
- •(c) EUC — Extended Unix Code, a family of encodings each made for one East Asian language (EUC-JP for Japanese, EUC-KR for Korean), not one set for all languages
Key rule: Codes such as ASCII, EBCDIC, EUC and Shift JIS each cover one script or region; Unicode covers them all in one set, so text in any language can be exchanged without converting between codes.
Basic Theory · AI-written, may contain errors
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