Unicode Text
View Unicode code points, UTF-8 and UTF-16 byte sizes, character count, and category breakdown for any text. Free online Unicode text analysis tool for developers and linguists.
About This Calculator
About the Unicode Text Analyzer
The Unicode Text Analyzer is a free online tool that reveals the hidden structure of any text. Type or paste any string and instantly see each character's Unicode code point in both hexadecimal (U+XXXX) and decimal formats, the total character count, the UTF-8 and UTF-16 byte sizes, and a category breakdown showing whether each character is a letter, digit, punctuation, symbol, whitespace, or mark. This tool is essential for web developers, software engineers, linguists, and anyone working with international text encoding.
Unicode is the global standard for text encoding, assigning a unique numeric code point to every character across all writing systems, from Latin and Cyrillic to Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari, and emojis. Understanding the byte representation of text is critical for data storage, network transmission, database design, and ensuring proper text rendering across different platforms and devices. UTF-8 has become the dominant encoding on the web, used by over 98% of websites according to W3C statistics, while UTF-16 remains common in Java, .NET, JavaScript strings, and Windows environments.
Regional Notes
India (IN): Unicode support is vital for Indian languages including Hindi (Devanagari), Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), and Urdu (Perso-Arabic). Each Indian script has a dedicated Unicode block, and proper encoding ensures correct rendering of complex scripts with conjunct consonants and vowel signs. The Indian government mandates Unicode compliance for all e-governance applications under the TDIL program.
United States (US): ASCII compatibility remains important for legacy systems, but full Unicode support is required for modern web applications serving diverse populations. The US supports Unicode through CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) standards for locale-specific formatting of dates, currencies, and names.
United Kingdom (UK): The UK government recommends Unicode (UTF-8) for all public sector digital services under the Government Digital Service standards. Unicode ensures consistent handling of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Cornish language characters alongside standard Latin text.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Unicode code point?
A Unicode code point is a unique numeric identifier assigned to each character in the Unicode standard. For example, the letter A has code point U+0041 (decimal 65). Code points are written in hexadecimal notation with the U+ prefix and range from U+0000 to U+10FFFF, supporting over 1.1 million characters across all world scripts.
How many bytes does a Unicode character use in UTF-8?
In UTF-8 encoding, a Unicode character can use 1 to 4 bytes. ASCII characters (U+0000 to U+007F) use 1 byte, Latin and most European scripts use 2 bytes, Asian scripts like Chinese and Japanese use 3 bytes, and rare characters (emojis, ancient scripts) use 4 bytes. This variable-length design makes UTF-8 efficient for English text and fully backward compatible with ASCII.
What is the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16?
UTF-8 and UTF-16 are two common Unicode encoding schemes. UTF-8 uses 1 to 4 bytes per character and is ASCII-compatible, making it the dominant encoding for web pages and file systems. UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes per character and is used internally by systems like Windows, Java, and JavaScript. For ASCII text, UTF-8 is more compact (1 byte vs 2 bytes per character), while UTF-16 is more compact for East Asian scripts.
Can Unicode represent emojis and special symbols?
Yes, Unicode supports over 3,600 emoji characters and thousands of special symbols including mathematical operators, currency signs, arrows, dingbats, and technical symbols. Emojis are assigned code points in the range U+1F300 to U+1F9FF and beyond. Some emojis are formed by combining multiple code points using zero-width joiners, such as family and profession emojis.
How do I find the Unicode value of a character?
Enter the character in this Unicode Text Analyzer and the tool will display its code point in hexadecimal (U+XXXX format) and decimal. You can also use JavaScript's charCodeAt() and codePointAt() methods in the browser console, or look up characters on websites like FileFormat.info and Unicode.org.
What is the difference between codePointAt and charCodeAt in JavaScript?
charCodeAt() returns a 16-bit value (0 to 65535) and cannot represent characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, such as most emojis. codePointAt() returns the full Unicode code point (0 to 1114111) and correctly handles surrogate pairs for characters above U+FFFF. Always use codePointAt() when working with emojis and non-BMP characters.
Why do some characters show as squares or question marks?
Characters display as squares, question marks, or blank spaces when the font used by your device or application does not include that Unicode character. This is called a tofu or missing glyph. To fix this, install a font that covers the required Unicode range, such as Noto Fonts by Google, which provide comprehensive coverage for all Unicode scripts.
Is this Unicode text analyzer free to use?
Yes, this Unicode text analyzer on Calculy is completely free to use with no registration required. You can analyze unlimited text entries for Unicode code points, byte sizes, and character categories directly in your browser. No data is sent to any server all processing happens locally on your device.