What is Unicode? and how does coding work?

Question

A few hours before I read the programming book c. While I was reading the book, I came across these words: character encoding and Unicode. Then I started looking for Unicode information. Then I found out that the Unicode character set has every character from each language and UTF-8 , 16.32 can encode the characters listed in the unicode character set.

but I could not understand how it works.
Unicode depends on the operating system?
How is this related to software and software?
Is UTF-8 software that is installed on my computer when I installed the operating system?
or is it related to equipment?
and how does a computer encode things?

I found this so confusing. Please answer me in detail. I am new to these things, so please keep this in mind while you give me an answer.

thanks.

Answer 1

I talked about this in detail in What every programmer absolutely, positively needs to know about encodings and character sets for working with text . Here are some highlights:

• encodings are numerous, encodings define how a "character", such as "A", can be encoded as bits and bytes.
• In most encodings, only this is indicated for a small number of selected characters; for example, all (or at least most) of the characters needed to write English or Czech; single-byte encodings usually support a set of up to 256 characters.
• Unicode is one large standard effort that catalogs and sets the character ratio for virtually all the characters and characters of each main language used, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of characters.
• UTF-8, 16 and 32 are different sub-standards for how to encode this ginorm catalog of numbers into bytes, each with different compromises in size
• software must specifically support Unicode and its UTF- * encodings, as well as to support any other specialized encoding; most of the work is done by the OS these days, which provides supporting functions for the application.