BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

  Humanities Technology and Research Support Center

DigHT 310
In-class Exercise:
Exploring Unicode

Unicode characters.

Unicode organizes various language groups into 128-character groupings called blocks. See http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/Blocks.txt for a listing of these blocks. In the classroom we used the Mac OS X Calculator utility (Macintosh HD > /Applications/Utilities). When we switch the calculator to Programmer mode (View menu > Programmer) we get a handy utility that lets us enter either decimal or hexidecimal values and see the corresponding ASCII or Unicode character. (The Calculator program for Windows XP--Start > Accessories > Calculator; set View to Scientific-- also provides a hexidecimal-decimal conversion, but without the Unicode character display. If you find a Windows application that also does the Unicode lookup, please let me know!) There is also a nice web page with a Unicode Character Map that displays the characters for each Unicode block. These utilities will help you answer the following questions.

1. What unicode block(s) contains Cyrillic characters?
hex:
decimal:

Hebrew?
hex:
decimal:

2. Draw the character represented by unicode hex value F967 (decimal 63847). What unicode block does this fall in?

3. At what unicode value (decimal and hex) do you find the lower case ü, as in German 'über'?

4. HTML provides a way of embedding unicode characters in html text using something called 'unicode entities'. The Unicode character map at http://www-atm.physics.ox.ac.uk/user/iwi/charmap.html demonstrates how to express unicode characters in HTML. Try choosing a code block other than Basic Latin, then click on a character or two so they appear in the text field at the top. Now click on the Make HTML button. What appears in the lower field?

What do you suppose the number after '&#' represents? In which base is this number expressed? Check your hypothesis with the Calculator program.


This exercise has introduced you to the concept of character encoding in unicode. Next we will look at how to create, read, write, and manipulate unicode in LiveCode.

You are not required to turn this stack in, but you should be very familiar with the information and scripting used in this exercise.