What is ISO-IEC 10646:2017?

ISO-IEC 10646:2017, also known as Universal Coded Character Set (UCS), is an international standard for character encoding. It provides a unique numerical code point for each character used in modern and historic scripts of the world's languages.

Character Sets and Encoding Forms

The standard defines three character sets - The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), and Supplementary Ideographic Plane (SIP). These character sets cover a wide range of languages and symbols including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, mathematical symbols, and more.

ISO-IEC 10646:2017 also specifies various encoding forms, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. These encoding forms allow efficient representation of characters from different planes using variable-length code units.

Benefits and Applications

One of the key benefits of ISO-IEC 10646:2017 is its global interoperability. By providing a standard representation for characters across different scripts and languages, it ensures that text can be exchanged and displayed correctly on various computer systems.

This standard plays a vital role in multilingual communication, internationalization, localization of software applications, and database management. It is essential for industries like computing, telecommunications, e-commerce, and mobile technologies that operate in a global context.

Conclusion

ISO-IEC 10646:2017 is a critical standard in the field of character encoding. It enables the representation of a vast range of characters and symbols used worldwide, ensuring compatibility and proper display across different platforms and devices. Its significance goes beyond the technical realm, as it facilitates effective communication among diverse cultures and languages.