The advantages of Unicode

Unicode has many advantages, as listed in the following table.

Table 1. Unicode's advantages
Advantage Explanation
Simplified application development When an application component uses Unicode, all symbols needed by the application for reading and writing character data reside in a single code page.This simplifies application development enormously.
Ease of migration of existing code UTF-8 includes the traditional ASCII characters in its first 127 positions and assigns each of these characters its traditional ASCII value. This simplifies adapting existing ASCII applications to Unicode.
Ease of providing shared access to data OpenEdge clients that use incompatible code pages can easily read and write a single UTF-8 database.OpenEdge automatically converts the code page as data passes between the client and the database.
Ease of worldwide deployment UTF-8 databases and r-code files are multi-lingual.They can be deployed worldwide.
Interoperability Active-X and Java clients are Unicode based.They can communicate with UTF-8 databases and PAS for OpenEdge instances.
Web compatibility Unicode is becoming the universal code page of the Web. Current Web standards require Unicode and rely on it.
Multi-lingual applications Applications using Unicode can support multiple languages in:
  • Data
  • User interface
  • Reports