Unicode: The Universal Character Set.

The article presents information about unicode, which are known to be the universal character set. Computers have become an indispensable part of one's life. Until recently, the outdated key character set standard, ASCII was in use. This character set has numerous limitations such as because of its constraint to include only seven of the eight bits in the byte, there is no room in ASCII to expand beyond the characters needed for the English language. Thus, in order to respond to the needs of international customer base, unicode character set is developed. The universal character set has numerous advantage because of the large number of characters that these languages share due to their common origins. These codes have found out a new way to encode languages for computer manipulation. These encoding allows over one million characters to be defined. Such codes covers not only currently used languages but also ancient languages that are studied by historians and scholars. These single character set have many advantages for all languages are particularly evident in libraries where works occur in different scripts.