The Unicode Standard is an international standardized character set. It attempts to assign characters and symbols from every writing system a unique number. With every major new version, additional characters are added to the Standard to achieve this goal. In providing a unified character set for all writing systems, text information can be exchanged in a Unicode format independent of any given platform.

The Unicode Standard also contains property data on the characters, and defines algorithms on how to properly manipulate characters. For example, these algorithms provide the correct method to search and display Unicode text.