Unicode code point converter

Type text on the left to get its code points on the right. Decoding accepts U+0041, the backslash-u form and HTML entities all mixed together, which is what a log file usually hands you.

Format decides which notation the output uses. Pick the one that matches where the text is going: documentation, a JavaScript string, or markup.

A code point is a character's number in the Unicode table, written U+ and then hexadecimal. A is U+0041, an accented e is U+00E9, the earth emoji is U+1F30D. Turning those numbers into bytes is a separate job, handled by UTF-8 or UTF-16. See binary for that layer.

The distinction earns its keep when text misbehaves. U+FFFD means bytes were damaged before they reached you. A letter followed by U+0301 means the accent is a separate combining mark, which is how two strings that look identical fail to match.

Unicode started from a confident assumption: 65,536 characters would cover every script in use. It didn't. When the table outgrew 16 bits the fix was surrogate pairs, two units standing in for one character, and that patch is why so many languages still report an emoji as having a length of 2.

The emoji arrived from an unlikely direction. Shigetaka Kurita drew 176 of them for a Japanese pager network in 1999, each one 12 pixels square, to squeeze weather and moods into messages that charged by the character. Unicode absorbed them a decade later, and they're now the reason most people ever meet a code point above U+FFFF.

Character codes shows the same numbers in decimal, hex or octal without the U+ notation, and binary shows the bytes they become.

If you're chasing characters that display as boxes, the script converters are the other half of that story: runes and Ogham output Unicode blocks that many devices have no font for.