The Unicode Standard provides a unique number for every character, no matter what platform, device, application or language. It has been adopted by all modern software providers and now allows data to be transported through many different platforms, devices and applications without corruption.
A world-wide standard developed to help overcome the limitations of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) released as a standard in October 1991. With Unicode each character uses a unique number between U+0000 and U+10FFFF, Unicode may be 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit.