hi,i m a new programmer.i just wanted to know about "UNICODE" concept in java langauage.what does it mean exactly.kindly give me the details with examples.

thanx in advance
regds,
hp

harac prasanna parida

Unicode is a replacement for the old ASCII way of encoding characters. Basically it uses more bits to represent each character, so it means you can represent a larger number of characters. More info on:

http://www.unicode.org/

HTH

--
Don't Stand on your head - you'll get footprints in your hair
                                           http://charlieharvey.org.uk
                                              http://charlieharvey.com

 Unicode isn't particularly a 'java' concept so much as something incorporated into java. As ciderpunx pointed out, it's a replacement for ASCII that basically uses 16 bits (two bytes) to encode a character rather than 8 bits (1 byte). This provides 2^16 possible variations rather than 2^8, which some guys somewhere figured ought to be enough to encode just about every character in every alphabit known to man. Lots of operating systems use unicode internally now too. But unicode is backwardes-compatbile with ansi .. here's an example:

(ASCII Encoding of letter 'a')
character binary decimal
a 01100001 61


(UNICODE Encoding of letter 'a', periods indicate byte boundaries)
a 00000000.01100001 0.0

As you can see, the first byte of the unicode 'a' is all zeros, the second byte is the same as the ASCII value.

Regards,
Meredith Shaebanyan