Unicode

Unicode is a worldwide character-encoding standard. Windows NT/Windows 2000 uses it exclusively at the system level for character and string manipulation. Unicode simplifies localization of software and improves multilingual text processing. By implementing it in your applications, you can enable the application with universal data exchange capabilities for global marketing, using a single binary file for every possible character code.

Unicode defines semantics for each character, standardizes script behavior, provides a standard algorithm for bidirectional text, and defines cross-mappings to other standards. Among the scripts supported by Unicode are Latin, Greek, Han, Hiragana, and Katakana. Supported languages include, but are not limited to, German, French, English, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese.

Unicode can represent all the world's characters in modern computer use, including technical symbols and special characters used in publishing. Because each Unicode character is 16 bits wide, it is possible to have separate values for up to 65,536 characters. Unicode-enabled functions are often referred to as "wide-character" functions.

Win32 functions support applications that use either Unicode or the regular ANSI character set. Mixed use in the same application is also possible. Adding Unicode support to an application is easy, and you can even maintain a single set of sources from which to compile an application that supports either Unicode or the Windows ANSI character set.

Win32 functions support Unicode by assigning its strings a specific data type and providing a separate set of entry points and messages to support this new data type. A series of macros and naming conventions make transparent migration to Unicode, or even compiling both non-Unicode and Unicode versions of an application from the same set of sources, a straightforward matter.

Implementing Unicode as a separate data type also enables the compiler's type checking to ensure that only Unicode parameters are used with functions expecting Unicode strings.

For a list of functions that support Unicode under Windows 95/98, see Windows 95/98 General Limitations.