Unicode code point

A Unicode code point is an ID number assigned to represent an abstract character symbol within the Unicode standard, expressed in the form U+XXXX, where XXXX is a hexadecimal number. For example, the character uppercase A has a code point of U+0041.

Code points are used in character encoding to map specific characters to numerical values, allowing for consistent representation of text across different systems. Unicode defines a total of 1,114,112 code points, organized into 17 planes, each containing 65,536 code points. The encoding forms, such as UTF-8 and UTF-16, determine how these code points are represented as sequences of bytes.