How to Convert Text to Unicode Code Points

How to Convert Text to Unicode Code Points

The process for working with character encodings in Python, or converting text to Unicode code points at any point in time, can be incredibly confusing, complex, and convoluted – especially if you aren’t particularly familiar with the Unicode language to begin with.

Thankfully though, there are a lot of tools (and a lot of tutorials) out there that can dramatically streamline and simplify things for you moving forward.

You’ll find the inside information below incredibly useful at helping you tackle Unicode code points but there are a host of “automatic converters” that you might want to take advantage of online as well (almost all of the best ones being open-source and free of charge, too). If you’re working with a web host like BlueHost, or using a CMS like WordPress, then this conversion process is already taken care of for you.

By the time you’re done with the details below you’ll know exactly how to:

Understand the overall conceptual point of character encodings and the numbering system in Unicode

How Unicode has built-in support for numbering systems through different INT literals

How to take advantage of built-in functions that are specifically designed to “play nicely” with character encodings and different numbering systems

Let’s dig right in.

What exactly is character encoding to begin with?

To start things off you have to understand exactly what character encoding is to begin with, which can be a bit of a tall task considering the fact that there are hundreds of character encodings that you can deal with as a programmer throughout your career.

One of the very simplest character encodings is ASCII so that’s going to be the fundamental standpoint that we work with throughout this quick example. Relatively small and including contained encoding you aren’t going to have to worry about a whole lot of headache or hassle wrapping your head around this process but will be able to use the fundamentals here in any other character encoding you do later down the line.

ASCII encompasses:

All lowercase English letters as well as all uppercase English letters

Most traditional punctuation and symbols you’ll find on a keyboard

Whitespace markers

And even some non-printable characters

All of these inputs can be translated from traditional characters that we are able to see and read in our own native language (if you’re working in English, anyways) to integers and inevitably into computer bits – each and every one of that can be encoded to a very unique and specific sequence of bits that do something very specific in the world of Unicode.

If every single character has its own specific code point (sometimes referred to as an integer) that means that different characters are segmented into different code point ranges inside of the actual ASCII “language”.

In ASCII a code point range breakdown is as follows:

0 through 31 code points – These are your control or nonprintable characters

32 through 64 code points – These are your symbols, your numbers, and punctuation marks as well as whitespace

65 through 90 code points – These would be all of your uppercase English alphabet letters

91 through 96 code points – Graphemes that can include brackets and backslashes

97 through 122 code points – These are your lowercase English alphabet letters

123 through 126 code points – Ancillary graphemes

Code point 127 – This is your Control point or the Delete key

All 128 of those individual characters encompass the entirety of the character set that is “understood” by the ASCII language. If a character is input into ASCII that isn’t included in the list we highlighted above isn’t going to be expressed and it isn’t going to be understood based on this encoding scheme.

How Bits Work

As we highlighted above, individual characters are going to be converted into individual code points that are later expressed as integers and bits – the essential building block of all language and information that computers understand.

A bit is the expression of binary language, a signal that your computer understands because it only has one of two binary states. A bit is either a zero or a one, a “yes” or a “no”, a “true” or a “false”, and it’s either going to be “on” or it’s going to be “off”.

Because all the data that computers have to work with needs to be condensed down to its bare-bones and its most essential elements (bits) each and every one of those individual characters that may be input into the Unicode language has to be distilled down into decimal form.

As more decibels are added the binary form is expanded on, always looking for ways to express the information and data being conveyed in binary form so that the computer can understand exactly what’s happening.

The problem with ASCII and the rise of Unicode

The reason that Unicode exists has a lot to do with the fact that ASCII as a computer language simply doesn’t have a large enough set of characters to accommodate every other language in the world, unique dialects, and computers that are capable of working with and reading different symbols and glyphs.

Truth be told, the biggest knock against ASCII has always been that it doesn’t even have a large enough character set to accommodate the entirety of the English language, even.

This is where Unicode swings in to the scene.

Essentially acting as the same fundamental building block language that your computer can understand, Unicode is made up of a much larger (MUCH larger) set of individual code points.

There are technically a variety of different encoding schemes that can be taken advantage of when it comes to Unicode as well, each of them with their own distinct code points, but the overwhelming majority of folks using Unicode are going to leverage UTF-8 (something that’s become a bit of a universal standard).

Unicode significantly expands on the traditional ASCII table. Instead of being capable of handling 128 characters, though, Unicode can handle 1,114,112 different characters – representing a significant upgrade that allows for far more complexity and precision in a programming language.

At the same time, some argue that Unicode isn’t exactly and encoding specifically but instead is something more of an implementation of a variety of other character encodings. There’s a lot of nuance here that you may or may not be interested in getting into (depending on how deep you want to dive into the world of Unicode), but it’s important to know that there is a distinction between the two.

How to actually convert text into Unicode

If you are seriously interested in converting text into Unicode the odds are very (VERY) good that you aren’t going to want to handle the heavy lifting all on your own, simply because of the complexity that all those individual characters and their encoding can represent.

Instead, you’ll want to take advantage of online conversion tools that allow you to input pretty much any character imaginable directly into this tool and have it immediately transform that character set (that very specific character set) into exact Unicode – almost always in UTF-8 but sometimes in UTF-16 or UTF-32, depending on what you are interested in.

These conversion tools are ridiculously easy to use and as long as you are moving forward with conversion solutions from reputable sources you shouldn’t have anything to worry about as far as accuracy, security, or safety are concerned.

It sure beats having to try and figure out the binary code points of characters in Unicode manually!