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An internationalised character set. cf ASCII, BOM.

If viewed using an ASCII text editor a Unicode file will typically appear as though every other character is a letter. This is because Unicode (typically) uses two bytes per character compared with ASCII's one byte per character.

Unicode characters when written are expressed as "U+xxxx" where "xxxx" are hex digits that define that character. So U+0041 is the letter "A", which (by design) is the same as the ASCII code for "A".

For more information see: