Unicode explained | Convert characters in Chuck Norris jokes - JavaScript example

Key Takeaways

67 104 117 99 107 1078 111 114 114 105 115 this is how you say Chuck Norris and Unicode let's check this out in more detail in the video on textual data we learned that computers use character encoding systems to represent characters as numbers under the hood each character is assigned a number and the computer sees this number okay fine you might say this seems logical but is it possible to see these numbers for example you give me a character and I give you a number we won't talk in business yet we will discuss in my curiosity this question brings us naturally to Unicode Unicode provides us with a standard list of unique codes for each character from most of the world's writing systems before unicode there were many different coding systems out there for assigning numbers to characters one major issue with having multiple systems is that the same code or number might be assigned to multiple characters this type of issue causes problems when sending text from one computer to another this is why Unicode was created so we could have a unique code for each character hmm unique code unicode let me show you how we can encode and decode some characters using javascript if you insist the word encode is a verb that means convert to coded form with unicode we start with a character and we convert to a number so in this case the coded form is just a number we call the unicode number value a character code if we look at the string Chuck we can find the character code for any character in the string by using the dot and selecting char code @ char code at is a piece of code that will return the character code for any character at a particular index within a string let's get the code for the capital letter C at index 0 this shows us that the unicode character code for the capital letter c is indeed 67 we can verify this by using Google and searching for Unicode lists on the flip side D code is a verb that means convert from coded form to do this we take the character code 67 and we use a piece of code that is available for all strings we want to get a string from a character code string dot from char code does this for us these two pieces of code show us how we can encode and decode unicode values or in a notebook now that I've set up so we can encode and decode full sentences more easily this is publicly available so please by all means check this out and play with it yourself link in the description all right we have a list of jokes to play around with this data is in a format called JSON if you aren't familiar with that don't worry we'll cover JSON later in the playlist you'll notice that each question is decoded while the answers are encoded using Unicode this is intentional so you can have something to try out yourself below down below we have two sections a section to encode some characters and a section to decode some codes it works like this each section has an input and an output we provide the input and we get the corresponding output in real time [Music] let me show you the code that generates the output to see this we just click that arrow next to the output what I want you to notice is the use of the code that we saw in the console for encoding char code at is being used and for decoding string dot from char code is being used this shows how we can encode and decode characters using code most of the time we don't have to deal with or even think about these underlying numbers because ultimately the characters are what we care about however every time we save a file that contains textual data a character encoding is being used for this reason character encodings are sometimes a concern particularly when we want to open a file and read its data depending on where the file is from it's possible to run into encoding issues so keep character encoding in the back of your mind if you ever run into any problems reading textual data from a file let me know in the comments if you like this video and if you have any questions for this video please encode all comments using unicode before posting the gist [Music]