Displaying Unicode in Notepad (2024)

If you have viewed a Web page containing strange characters you did not understand, you may have seen Unicode characters. Unicode consists of a character set that covers most languages in the world. Browsers that understand Unicode can display Unicode characters on a Web page. Many text editors, including Notepad, also allow you to display Unicode text.

Notepad Encoding Options

  1. Different software programs encode characters in different ways. Notepad can manage text encoded in several formats such as ANSI, Unicode and UTF-8. Find these options by clicking the "Encoding" button on Notepad's Save As window. After creating or updating text in a document, you can select one of these encoding options in which to save the file. If you do not choose an option, Notepad saves your document in its default ANSI format.

UTF Encoding

  1. A UTF-8 character is also a Unicode character that consists of 8 bytes. A byte is a small computer unit. UTF-8 is also an efficient format used widely in transmissions over the Internet. UTF-16 and UTF-32, which do not appear in Notepad's Save As window, also produce Unicode characters whose byte sizes are 16 and 32. Unicode defines unique characters, but it also has the ability to combine characters and create new ones, such as letters that contain accents.

Displaying Unicode in Notepad

  1. The quickest way to add Unicode text to a Notepad document is to paste it there. Visit a website or open an email message that displays Unicode characters, hold down your left mouse button and copy them as you would normal text. After launching Notepad, you can right-click inside a document and click "Paste" to paste the Unicode text. After saving your document, open it again to display its contents. Copy, cut and paste Unicode text as you normally would regular text.

Tips

  1. If you are a fan of unusual Unicode characters, such as those that display faces and interesting shapes, you can use Notepad to create a library of those characters. Whenever you need to use one in an email or on a forum post, copy it from your Notepad document and paste it in the desired location. If you attempt to save a Unicode document in an ANSI format, Windows warns that you will lose your Unicode formatting if you do not choose a Unicode encoding option from the "Encoding" drop-down list in the Save As window.

Displaying Unicode in Notepad (2024)

FAQs

How do I show Unicode in notepad? ›

Notepad can manage text encoded in several formats such as ANSI, Unicode and UTF-8. Find these options by clicking the "Encoding" button on Notepad's Save As window. After creating or updating text in a document, you can select one of these encoding options in which to save the file.

How many characters can Unicode display? ›

The Unicode Standard is intended to support the needs of all types of users, whether in business or academia, using mainstream or minority scripts. Q: How many characters are in Unicode? The short answer is that as of Version 15.0, the Unicode Standard contains 149,186 characters.

How do I reveal Unicode? ›

You can also see the Unicode value of a character by placing the cursor immediately after the character and pressing Alt-x.

How do I display Unicode symbols in HTML? ›

You do this by adding &# in front of the Unicode number, and ; after, and this will display in HTML as the actual unicode character. For example: J will display J in HTML.

How do I view UTF-8 in Notepad? ›

utf-8, created from the previous chapter first.
  1. Run Notepad and click menu File > Open. The open file dialog box comes up.
  2. Select the hello.utf-8 text file and select the UTF-8 option in the Encoding field. See the picture below: ...
  3. Click the Open button. The UTF-8 file opens in the editor correctly.

Why do some Unicode characters not show up? ›

If you are unable to read some Unicode characters in your browser, it may be because your system is not properly configured. Here are some basic instructions for doing that. There are two basic steps: Install fonts that cover the characters you need.

How many values in Unicode? ›

The maximum possible number of code points Unicode can support is 1,114,112 through seventeen 16-bit planes. Each plane can support 65,536 different code points. Among the more than one million code points that Unicode can support, version 4.0 curently defines 96,382 characters at plane 0, 1, 2, and 14.

How many bits are needed for Unicode? ›

Unicode uses two encoding forms: 8-bit and 16-bit, based on the data type of the data that is being that is being encoded. The default encoding form is 16-bit, where each character is 16 bits (2 bytes) wide. Sixteen-bit encoding form is usually shown as U+hhhh, where hhhh is the hexadecimal code point of the character.

How many characters in 16-bit Unicode? ›

16-bit Unicode or Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-16) is a method of encoding character data, capable of encoding 1,112,064 possible characters in Unicode.

How do I change Unicode in Notepad? ›

Go to "File -> Save As... " and choose UniCode under "Encoding:", press "Save" and overwrite existing file. Close the file.

How to see hidden characters? ›

The Show/Hide

button turns hidden characters like spaces, paragraph markers, or tab marks on and off. Go to File > Options > Display.

How do I find Unicode in text? ›

Go to Insert >Symbol > More Symbols. Find the symbol you want. Tip: The Segoe UI Symbol font has a very large collection of Unicode symbols to choose from. On the bottom right you'll see Character code and from:.

How do I insert Unicode characters? ›

Inserting Unicode characters

To insert a Unicode character, type the character code, press ALT, and then press X. For example, to type a dollar symbol ($), type 0024, press ALT, and then press X. For more Unicode character codes, see Unicode character code charts by script.

What is Unicode range in HTML? ›

The unicode-range CSS descriptor sets the specific range of characters to be used from a font defined by @font-face and made available for use on the current page. If the page doesn't use any character in this range, the font is not downloaded; if it uses at least one, the whole font is downloaded.

How do I change Unicode in HTML? ›

Changing an HTML page to Unicode
  1. Step 1: Save the data as UTF-8. It will not be sufficient to just change the declarations inside your pages to say that the page is encoded in UTF-8. ...
  2. Step 2: Declare the encoding in your page. ...
  3. Step 3: Ensure that your server does the right thing.
May 21, 2016

Is UTF-8 the same as Unicode? ›

The Difference Between Unicode and UTF-8

Unicode is a character set. UTF-8 is encoding. Unicode is a list of characters with unique decimal numbers (code points).

Is UTF-8 ASCII or Unicode? ›

UTF-8 encodes Unicode characters into a sequence of 8-bit bytes. The standard has a capacity for over a million distinct codepoints and is a superset of all characters in widespread use today. By comparison, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) includes 128 character codes.

How do I view characters in Notepad? ›

Click View → Summary. Double-click on Length / Lines on the Status Bar (shortcut to Summary) Use TextFX → TextFX Tools → Word Count.

How do I change Unicode settings? ›

In the Region Settings window, click Language and then click Administrative language settings. In the Region dialog, on the Administrative tab, click Change system locale. In the resulting dialog, select the desired Unicode language from the Current system locale list.

What is the problem with Unicode? ›

Unicode is inconsistent with regards to which symbols get unique codes, and which do not. So that all of the accented letters of the European languages have their own code (Ő is 0150), but Native American symbols, like Guaraní g̃ have to be made up from two codes, 0067 (g) and 0303 (combining ~) or Dene Ų̀.

How do I get Unicode to work on Windows 10? ›

Press the Alt key and then type the four-digit Unicode value. For this to work, you need to have a separate number pad on your keyboard, and the NumLock key should be enabled. If you're working with Microsoft Word, WordPad, Outlook, or another Microsoft app, you can type in the Unicode value and then type Alt-X.

What is the Unicode for 1 digit *? ›

Unicode Character “1” (U+0031)
Name:Digit One
Numeric Value:1
Unicode Version:1.1 (June 1993)
Block:Basic Latin, U+0000 - U+007F
Plane:Basic Multilingual Plane, U+0000 - U+FFFF
11 more rows

What is Unicode example? ›

Unicode supports more than a million code points, which are written with a "U" followed by a plus sign and the number in hex; for example, the word "Hello" is written U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U+006F (see hex chart).

What is the most used Unicode? ›

The most popular Unicode character encoding is UTF-8. It's backwards compatible with US-ASCII. Roughly 87% of all web pages use the UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 uses 1, 2, 3, or 4 bytes to encode Unicode characters.

Why use UTF-16 instead of UTF-8? ›

UTF-16 is, obviously, more efficient for A) characters for which UTF-16 requires fewer bytes to encode than does UTF-8. UTF-8 is, obviously, more efficient for B) characters for which UTF-8 requires fewer bytes to encode than does UTF-16.

Is Unicode A 32 bit? ›

The 32-bit Unicode transformation format (UTF-32) is a fixed length Unicode code point encoding that uses exactly 32 bits per code point.

Is Unicode 64 bit? ›

Unicode (64-bit)

Is Unicode same as UTF-16? ›

UTF-16 is an encoding of Unicode in which each character is composed of either one or two 16-bit elements. Unicode was originally designed as a pure 16-bit encoding, aimed at representing all modern scripts.

Should I use UTF-8 or UTF-16? ›

There is a simple rule of thumb on what Unicode Transformation Form (UTF) to use: - utf-8 for storage and comunication - utf-16 for data processing - you might go with utf-32 if most of the platform API you use is utf-32 (common in the UNIX world).

What is the Unicode of 5? ›

Unicode Character “5” (U+0035)
Name:Digit Five
Numeric Value:5
Unicode Version:1.1 (June 1993)
Block:Basic Latin, U+0000 - U+007F
Plane:Basic Multilingual Plane, U+0000 - U+FFFF
11 more rows

How do I set UTF-8 in Notepad ++? ›

Open the file you want to verify/fix in Notepad++ In the top menu select Encoding > Convert to UTF-8 (option without BOM) Save the file.

What Encoding does Notepad use? ›

Files by default, are encoded in Notepad with either ANSI or UTF-8 (depending on the Notepad version). ANSI encoding generally is used for the Latin character set (including the English alphabet), and UTF-8 supports the Unicode character set (a global character set).

How do I change the Unicode of a file? ›

Click Tools, then select Web options. Go to the Encoding tab. In the dropdown for Save this document as: choose Unicode (UTF-8). Click Ok.

What is an invisible Unicode character? ›

Hidden text or invisible characters? They use invisible text or invisible character to represent an empty space without using space key. Whitespace character does not appear on the screen. It is usually a blank Unicode character or text type such as U+0020, U+00A0, U+FEFF, etc.

How do you show hidden characters in notepad? ›

Go to View Menu > Select Show Symbol > Select Show All Characters . It displays all hidden characters in the opened file.

How do you pull up special characters? ›

In your document, position the insertion point where you want the special character to appear. Press and hold down the ALT key while you type the four number Unicode value for the character. Note that NUM LOCK must be on, and you have to use the number pad keys to type the Unicode character value.

Is a .txt file a Unicode? ›

txt uses Unicode/UTF-8" is the Byte Order Mark at the beginning of the text file. By the way it is represented in actual bytes, it tells the reader which Unicode encoding to use to read the file.

What is a Unicode text format? ›

Unicode is a universal encoding scheme for written characters and text that enables the exchange of data internationally. Two transformation formats, UTF_16 and UCS_2, of Unicode are supported with DDS. A Unicode field in a display file can contain UCS-2 or UTF-16 data.

Are all fonts Unicode? ›

Unicode is not a font, but most fonts are built on the specifications of the Unicode Standard. The Unicode Standard defines characters, assigning a unique number to each character. Fonts use this number to refer to the character. To put it another way, you access the characters in Unicode via fonts.

How do I type Unicode characters in Windows 10 without numpad? ›

Select a character and press Alt + X to convert that character into it's unicode number. The code is shown on the left hand side of the status bar in Character Map in the form U + <hexadecimal code>, e.g., U + 0061 for the letter a.

What character is █? ›

Unicode Character “█” (U+2588)
Name:Full Block
Category:Other Symbol (So)
Bidirectional Class:Other Neutral (ON)
Combining Class:Not Reordered (0)
Character is Mirrored:No
9 more rows

What is the Unicode for the letter C? ›

Unicode Character “C” (U+0043)

Why is UTF-16 UTF-16? ›

UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as code points are encoded with one or two 16-bit code units.

Does HTML support Unicode? ›

Web pages authored using HyperText Markup Language (HTML) may contain multilingual text represented with the Unicode universal character set.

How to use UTF-8 code in HTML? ›

The character encoding should be specified for every HTML page, either by using the charset parameter on the Content-Type HTTP response header (e.g.: Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 ) and/or using the charset meta tag in the file.

How to convert from Unicode to UTF-8? ›

The number of blocks needed to represent a character varies from 1 to 4. In order to convert Unicode to UTF-8 in Java, we use the getBytes() method. The getBytes() method encodes a String into a sequence of bytes and returns a byte array.

How do I convert Unicode to symbol? ›

Convert Unicode code point to character: chr()

It doesn't matter if it is filled with zeros. If you want to convert a hexadecimal string representing a Unicode code point to a character, convert the string to an integer and then pass it to chr() . Use int() to convert a hexadecimal string into an integer.

What is Unicode character set? ›

Unicode. Unicode is a universal character set, ie. a standard that defines, in one place, all the characters needed for writing the majority of living languages in use on computers. It aims to be, and to a large extent already is, a superset of all other character sets that have been encoded.

How do I get Unicode in text? ›

Go to Insert >Symbol > More Symbols. Find the symbol you want. Tip: The Segoe UI Symbol font has a very large collection of Unicode symbols to choose from. On the bottom right you'll see Character code and from:.

How do I enable Unicode in Windows? ›

In the Region Settings window, click Language and then click Administrative language settings. In the Region dialog, on the Administrative tab, click Change system locale. In the resulting dialog, select the desired Unicode language from the Current system locale list.

How do I change text to Unicode? ›

Unicode code converter. Type or paste text in the green box and click on the Convert button above it. Alternative representations will appear in all the other boxes. You can also do the same in any grey box, if you want to target only certain types of escaped text.

How do you show special characters in notepad? ›

How to view hidden characters in Notepad++ Go to View Menu > Select Show Symbol > Select Show All Characters . It displays all hidden characters in the opened file.

How do I view non printable characters? ›

To show non-printing characters in Word documents, click the “Home” tab in the Ribbon. Then click the “Show/Hide Non-Printing Characters” button within the “Paragraph” button group. To hide the display of the non-printing characters in your document, click the “Show/Hide Non-Printing Characters” button again.

Is UTF-16 same as Unicode? ›

UTF-16 is an encoding of Unicode in which each character is composed of either one or two 16-bit elements. Unicode was originally designed as a pure 16-bit encoding, aimed at representing all modern scripts.

Does Windows support Unicode? ›

While Unicode-enabled functions in Windows use UTF-16, it is also possible to work with data encoded in UTF-8 or UTF-7, which are supported in Windows as multibyte character set code pages. New Windows applications should use UTF-16 as their internal data representation.

What is the best Unicode? ›

UTF-8 is the best serialization transform of a stream of logical Unicode code points because, in no particular order: UTF-8 is the de facto standard Unicode encoding on the web.

How do I change Unicode to UTF-8? ›

Click Tools, then select Web options. Go to the Encoding tab. In the dropdown for Save this document as: choose Unicode (UTF-8). Click Ok.

What is Unicode text? ›

Unicode is an international character encoding standard that provides a unique number for every character across languages and scripts, making almost all characters accessible across platforms, programs, and devices.

How does Unicode work? ›

In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, not a glyph—for each character. In other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering (size, shape, font, or style) to other software, such as a web browser or word processor.

How do I change UniCode in notepad? ›

Go to "File -> Save As... " and choose UniCode under "Encoding:", press "Save" and overwrite existing file. Close the file.

How do I write non ascii characters in notepad? ›

In Notepad++, if you go to menu Search → Find characters in range → Non-ASCII Characters (128-255) you can then step through the document to each non-ASCII character. Be sure to tick off "Wrap around" if you want to loop in the document for all non-ASCII characters.

How do I turn on special characters? ›

To type special characters in Windows, hold the Alt key, type the number code associated with the special character you want using the numpad that's located on the right side of your keyboard. The row of numbers above your letter keys won't work.

Top Articles
Latest Posts
Article information

Author: Delena Feil

Last Updated:

Views: 6246

Rating: 4.4 / 5 (45 voted)

Reviews: 84% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Delena Feil

Birthday: 1998-08-29

Address: 747 Lubowitz Run, Sidmouth, HI 90646-5543

Phone: +99513241752844

Job: Design Supervisor

Hobby: Digital arts, Lacemaking, Air sports, Running, Scouting, Shooting, Puzzles

Introduction: My name is Delena Feil, I am a clean, splendid, calm, fancy, jolly, bright, faithful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.