What Is Unicode?
Unicode is the universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique code point to every character across all writing systems, symbols, and emoji. Each character has a code point (like U+0041 for 'A'), a name, a Unicode block, and a general category. This tool lets you inspect any text character by character or look up characters by their code point.
How to Use This Unicode Lookup
- 1In Inspect Text mode, type or paste text to see detailed information about each character.
- 2In Lookup by Code Point mode, enter a code point (U+1F600, 0x41, or 65) to find the character.
- 3Click any character glyph to copy it to your clipboard.
- 4View UTF-8 and UTF-16 byte representations, HTML entities, Unicode block, and category.
Common Use Cases
Debugging Encoding Issues
Inspect mysteriously broken text to identify wrong code points, invisible characters, or encoding mismatches.
Finding Special Characters
Look up a Unicode code point to find and copy the corresponding character (symbols, arrows, math operators).
Understanding Text Encoding
See how characters are encoded in UTF-8 and UTF-16 byte sequences.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Unicode code point?
A code point is a unique number assigned to each character in the Unicode standard, written as U+ followed by a hexadecimal number (e.g., U+0041 for 'A'). The full range is U+0000 to U+10FFFF.
What is the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16?
UTF-8 uses 1-4 bytes per character (1 byte for ASCII). UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes. UTF-8 is the dominant encoding on the web; UTF-16 is used internally by JavaScript and Windows.
Can this tool show character names for all Unicode characters?
Common characters (Latin, digits, punctuation) show their official Unicode name. For less common characters, the code point is shown. The tool covers all valid code points from U+0000 to U+10FFFF.