US

                          Unicode System

Unicode is a universal international standard character encoding that is capable of representing most of the world's written languages.

 Why Java use Unicode System ?.

Before Unicode, there were many language standards:

1. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) for the United States.
2. ISO 8859-1 Western European Language.
3. KOI-8 for Russian.
4. GB18030 and BIG-5 for Chinese, and so on.

Problems

This caused two problems:
A particular code value corresponds to different letters in the various language standards .

The encoding for languages with large character sets have have variable lengths. Some common characters are encoded as single bytes, others require two or more bytes.

Solution

To solve these problems, a new language standard was developed i.e. Unicode System.

In Unicode, a character holds 2 bytes, so java also uses 2 bytes for characters. 

lowest value:\u0000

highest value:\uFFFF