Unicode has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on the World Wide Web, Mark Davis, Google's senior international software architect, said in a blog post.

As a result, the Unicode Transformation Format 8 (UTF-8) encoding supports 2 31 code points, with most characters in the current Unicode character set requiring generally one or two bytes each.

One answer is Punycode, which is a way to represent Unicode characters in ASCII. However, while you could technically encode the raw bits of Unicode into characters, like Base64, there’s a snag.

Unicode can express any character as a 16-bit code, regardless of operating system or programming language. It includes almost all current alphabets (among them Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek, ...

Figure 1. The 1968 version of the ASCII code. (Dollar ‘$’ Characters indicate hexadecimal values) Let’s just pause for a moment to appreciate how tasty this version of the table looks (like all of the ...

Whereas ASCII is limited to 128 or 256 characters however, Unicode supports 17 individual planes, each of which can map 65,536 characters, for a grand total of 1,114,112 possible characters.

Punycode is specifically equipped to handle this, as it's a standard for representing Unicode text using ASCII characters. For example, the Chinese character “ 短 “ is represented in Punycode ...