Unicode and JavaScript
Update 2013-09-29: New sections 4.1 (“Matching any code unit”) and 4.2 (“Libraries”). This blog post is a brief introduction to Unicode and how it is handled in JavaScript. Unicode History Unicode was started in 1987, by Joe Becker (Xerox), Lee Collins (Apple) and Mark Davis (Apple). The idea was to create a universal character set, as there were many incompatible standards for encoding plain text at that time: numerous variations of 8 bit ASCII, Big Five (Traditional Chinese), GB 2312 (Simplified Chinese), etc. Before Unicode, no standard for multi-lingual plain text existed, but there were rich text systems (such as Apple’s WorldScript) that allowed one to combine multiple encodings. The first Unicode draft proposal was published in 1988. Work continued afterwards and the working group expanded. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated on January 3, 1991: The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationaliz...