There were many encoding schemes, for character sets of different languages. But they were not able to communicate with each other, as each of them represented characters in their own ways. Hence, text created using one encoding scheme was not recognised by another machine using different encoding scheme.
Therefore, a standard called UNICODE has been developed to incorporate all the characters of every written language of the world. UNICODE provides a unique number for every character, irrespective of device (server, desktop, mobile), operating system (Linux, Windows, iOS) or software application (different browsers, text editors, etc.). Commonly used UNICODE encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. It is a superset of ASCII, and the values 0–128 have the same character as in ASCII. Unicode characters for Devanagari script is shown in Table. Each cell of the table contains a character along with its equivalent hexadecimal value.
