UNICODE (UCS-2 ISO 10646) is a 16-bit character encoding that contains all of the characters (216 = 65,536 different characters total) in common use in the world's major languages, including Vietnamese. The Universal Character Set provides an unambiguous representation of text across a range of scripts, languages and platforms. It provides a unique number, called a code point (or scalar value), for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The Unicode standard is modeled on the ASCII character set. Since ASCII's 7-bit character size is inadequate to handle multilingual text, the Unicode Consortium adopted a 16-bit architecture which extends the BENEFITS of ASCII to multilingual text.

Unicode characters are consistently 16 bits wide, regardless of language, so no escape sequence or control code is required to specify any character in any language. Unicode character encoding treats symbols, alphabetic characters, and ideographic characters identically, so that they can be used simultaneously and with equal facility. Computer programs that use Unicode character encoding to represent characters but do not display or print text can (for the most part) remain unaltered when new scripts or characters are introduced.

The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys, and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, .NET, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many OPERATING systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools SUPPORTING it, offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. It allows data to be transported through many different systems without corruption.

Unicode (UCS-2 ISO 10646) is a 16-bit character encoding that contains all of the characters (216 = 65,536 different characters total) in common use in the world's major languages, including Vietnamese. The Universal Character Set provides an unambiguous representation of text across a range of scripts, languages and platforms. It provides a unique number, called a code point (or scalar value), for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The Unicode standard is modeled on the ASCII character set. Since ASCII's 7-bit character size is inadequate to handle multilingual text, the Unicode Consortium adopted a 16-bit architecture which extends the benefits of ASCII to multilingual text.

Unicode characters are consistently 16 bits wide, regardless of language, so no escape sequence or control code is required to specify any character in any language. Unicode character encoding treats symbols, alphabetic characters, and ideographic characters identically, so that they can be used simultaneously and with equal facility. Computer programs that use Unicode character encoding to represent characters but do not display or print text can (for the most part) remain unaltered when new scripts or characters are introduced.

The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys, and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, .NET, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. It allows data to be transported through many different systems without corruption.