B
Unicode Character Code Assignments

This appendix offers an introduction to how Unicode assigns characters. This appendix contains:

• Unicode Character Code Assignments

Unicode Character Code Assignments

Table B-1 contains Unicode details.

Table B-1 Unicode Character Code Assignments  

Characters	UTF-16 Character Codes		UTF-8 Character Codes
	First 16-bits	Second 16-bits	First Byte	Second Byte	Third Byte	Fourth Byte
ASCII	000-007F		00-7F
European (except ASCII), Arabic, Hebrew, etc.	0080-07FF		C2-DF	80-BF
Indic, Thai, certain symbols (for example, euro), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.	0800-0FFF		E0	A0-BF	80-BF
	1000 - CFFF		E1-EC	80-BF	80-BF
	D000 - D7FF		ED	80-9F	80-0BF
	F900-FFFF		EF	A4-BF	80-BF
Private Use Area #1	E000 - EFFF		EE	80-BF	80-BF
	F000 - F8FF		EF	80-A3	80-BF
Additional Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters, historic characters, musical and mathematical symbols, etc.	D800 - D8BF	DC00 - DFFF	F0	90-BF	80-BF	80-BF
	D8C0 - DABF	DC00 - DFFF	F1-F2	80-BF	80-BF	80-BF
	DAC0 - DB7F	DC00 - DFFF	F3	80-AF	80-BF	80-BF
Private Use Area #2	DB80 - DBBF	DC00 - DFFF	F3	B0-BF	80-BF	80-BF
	DBC0 - DBFF	DC00 - DFFF	F4	80-8F	80-BF	80-BF

Note: Blank spaces represent non-applicable code assignments. Character codes in this table are shown in hexadecimal representation

UTF-16 Encoding

As shown in Table B-1, UTF-16 character codes for some characters (Additional Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters and Private Use Area #2) are represented in two units of 16-bits. These are the surrogate pairs. A surrogate pair consists of two 16-bit values. The first 16-bit value is the high surrogate (the values are from 0xD800 to 0xDBFF). The second 16-bit value is the low surrogate (the values are from 0xDC00 to 0xDFFF). With surrogate pairs, UTF-16 character codes can represent more than one million characters. Without surrogate pairs, only up to 65,536 characters could be represented. Oracle's AL16UTF16 character set supports surrogate pairs.

See Also: "Surrogate Characters" for further information regarding surrogate pairs

UTF-8 Encoding

The UTF-8 character codes in Table B-1 show that:

• ASCII characters use 1-byte

• European (except ASCII), Arabic, and Hebrew characters require 2-bytes

• Indic, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters as well as certain symbols such as the one for the euro require 3-bytes

• Characters in the Private Use Area #1 require 3-bytes

• Additional Chinese/Japanese/Korean etc. characters require 4-bytes

• Characters in the Private Use Area #2 require 4-bytes

Oracle's AL32UTF8 character set supports 1-byte, 2-byte, 3-byte, and 4-byte values. Oracle's UTF8 character set supports 1-byte, 2-byte, and 3-byte values, but not 4-byte values.