Unicode Character Set

This topic is part of About Supported Character Sets.

To meet the needs of global operations, a number of software and hardware providers started the Unicode Consortium and created a Unicode standard during the 1990s. The repertoire of this international character code for information processing includes characters for the major scripts of the world, as well as technical symbols in common use. Unicode can represent 64 thousand planes of 64 thousand characters each. Unicode character encoding treats alphabetic characters, ideographic characters, such as Kanji, and symbols identically, which means that they can be used in any mixture with equal facility.

The original Unicode standard (1.0) defined a 16-bit entity as the basic unit to represent a character. This standard became the basis of the UCS-2 encoding of Unicode, which specifies 16 bits for each character, regardless of which language it might represent.

However, the UCS-2 standard considered 8 consecutive bits of zero value to be valid data, which has a different meaning to programs written in C, where it means the end of string. Because most Web and communications software was written in C at the time the Unicode standard was introduced, an alternative encoding of Unicode called UTF-8 became popular. It encodes exactly the same set of characters, but avoids the null byte problem. To do this, it represents data in variable amounts: 1, 2, or 3 bytes in length, depending on the character.

Today the Unicode standard has advanced further, and has defined an extension mechanism to encode more than 16 bits worth of information. This revised standard is now referred to as UTF-16. The UTF-8 standard has remained popular among Web users, and has added a fourth byte in size to address the Unicode extension mechanism. Today there are two forms of Unicode in active use, UTF-16 and UTF-8, and Siebel CRM uses both of them.

For more information about Unicode, see the Web site of the Unicode Consortium:

http://www.unicode.org

For more information about databases supported by Siebel CRM, see the Certifications tab on My Oracle Support. For a list of the languages supported by Siebel CRM, and the supported code pages for each database, see 1513102.1 (Article ID) on My Oracle Support.