Unicode Codepoint

Unicode Code Points

Unicode — also known as the Universal Coded Character Set — can represent virtually every character from every writing system in the world. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable-length encoding forms of Unicode.

Every character in Unicode has a unique numeric identifier called a code point, written in the form U+XXXX. For example, the Latin letter A is U+0041, and the Chinese character "山" is U+5C71.

How to Use

Look Up Code Points

Type any character into the input field and the tool will instantly display its Unicode code point. For example, entering the Chinese character "你" yields U+4F60.

You can enter multiple characters at once — the tool lists the code point for each one individually.

Look Up Characters by Code Point

If you already know a code point, enter it to see the corresponding character. For example, entering U+0041 reveals the uppercase letter A.

Handling Emoji and Special Characters

Emoji and some special symbols live on Unicode's Supplementary Planes, with code points above U+FFFF. For example:

• 😀 (grinning face) is U+1F600
• 🇨🇳 (flag) is actually composed of two Regional Indicator symbols

These characters require two UTF-16 code units (a surrogate pair) in JavaScript. The tool clearly displays these encoding details.

Understanding code points is essential when working with string length or character slicing — for instance, '😀'.length returns 2 in JavaScript because the emoji uses a surrogate pair.

Practical Applications

• Debugging encoding issues — Paste garbled text to identify the actual characters via their code points
• Finding escape sequences — Quickly look up the \u escape value for use in source code
• Verifying Unicode blocks — Confirm whether a character belongs to a specific block (CJK Unified Ideographs, Latin, etc.)

API

JavaScript

Use the built-in String API for code point conversion:

// Get the code point of a character
'🍉'.codePointAt(0) // => 127817

// Get the character from a code point
String.fromCodePoint(127817) // => '🍉'

Python

• ord — short for ordinal, returns the code point of a character
• chr — short for character, returns the character for a given code point

>>> ord('🍉')
127817

>>> chr(127817)
'🍉'

FAQ

Q: What is the difference between a code point and UTF-8 encoding?

A code point is the unique number that Unicode assigns to each character — it is an abstract numeric concept. For example, the character "山" has code point U+5C71. UTF-8 is a concrete encoding scheme that defines how to convert a code point into a sequence of bytes for storage. The same code point U+5C71 is encoded as 3 bytes (E5 B1 B1) in UTF-8, but only 2 bytes (5C 71) in UTF-16.

Q: Why do some characters have very large code points?

Unicode allocates code points in blocks. Common characters (Latin letters, frequently used CJK ideographs) have smaller code points within the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP, U+0000–U+FFFF). Emoji, historic scripts, and musical symbols are assigned to Supplementary Planes (U+10000 and above). The maximum possible code point is U+10FFFF, giving Unicode room for over 1.1 million characters.

Q: How do I get a character's code point in JavaScript?

Use String.prototype.codePointAt(). For example, '山'.codePointAt(0) returns 23665 (hex 0x5C71). For supplementary-plane characters like emoji, the older charCodeAt() method returns surrogate-pair values rather than the full code point — only codePointAt() gives the correct result. To convert a code point back to a character, use String.fromCodePoint(128512).