What is Unicode?

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number (called a code point) to every character used in written languages worldwide. Unlike older encoding systems like ASCII, which only supported 128 characters, Unicode can represent over 1.1 million characters—including letters from all alphabets, symbols, emojis, and special characters. This makes it essential for building software that works across different languages and platforms.

A Unicode code point is typically written as U+ followed by a hexadecimal number. For example, the letter "A" is U+0041, and the emoji 😀 is U+1F600. Different programming languages and systems represent these code points in various formats, which is why conversion between formats is often necessary.

Tool description

This tool converts text between plain characters and various Unicode representation formats. It supports bidirectional conversion between six different formats: plain text, Unicode code points, JavaScript escape sequences, HTML numeric entities, hexadecimal values, and decimal values. Simply select the input and output formats, and the conversion happens instantly.

Examples

Input Format Output
Hello Code Points U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F
Hello JS Escape \u0048\u0065\u006C\u006C\u006F
Hello HTML Entities Hello
Hello Hexadecimal 0048 0065 006C 006C 006F
Hello Decimal 72 101 108 108 111
😀 Code Points U+1F600
Привет JS Escape \u041F\u0440\u0438\u0432\u0435\u0442

Features

  • Bidirectional conversion between all six Unicode formats
  • Full Unicode support including emojis and characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)
  • Surrogate pair handling for JavaScript escape sequences with characters above U+FFFF
  • Real-time conversion as you type with instant results
  • Copy and swap functionality to quickly reverse conversions

Use cases

  • Web development: Convert special characters to HTML entities for safe display in web pages
  • JavaScript/JSON encoding: Escape non-ASCII characters for use in JavaScript strings or JSON files
  • Debugging encoding issues: Inspect the exact code points of characters to diagnose text encoding problems
  • Cross-platform text processing: Convert characters to numeric formats for systems that don't support Unicode natively
  • Learning Unicode: Explore how different characters are represented in various encoding formats