Interview Questions and Answers on Character Encoding - Unicode

Q1.  What is unicode ?

Ans. A way of encoding characters as binary numbers. The Unicode character set includes characters used in many languages, not just English. Unicode is the character set that is used internally by Java.

Q2.  How many bits are used to represent Unicode, ASCII, UTF-16, and UTF-8 characters?

Ans. Unicode requires 16 bits and ASCII require 7 bits. Although the ASCII character set uses only 7 bits, it is usually represented as 8 bits. UTF-8 represents characters using 8, 16, and 18 bit patterns. UTF-16 uses 16-bit and larger bit patterns.