Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

I.2. Unicode Transformation Formats

Although Unicode incorporates the limited ASCII character set (i.e.,a collection of characters), it encompasses a more comprehensive character set. In ASCII each character is represented by a byte containing 0s and 1s. One byte is capable of storing the binary numbers from 0 to 255. Each character is assigned a number between 0 and 255, thus ASCII-based systems can support only 256 characters, a tiny fraction of the world’s characters. Unicode extends the ASCII character set by encoding the vast majority of the world’s characters. The Unicode Standard encodes characters in a uniform numerical space from 0 to 10FFFF hexadecimal. An implementation will express these numbers in one of several transformation formats, ...