The Basic Latin

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...

, sometimes informally called C0 Controls and Basic Latin, is the first block of the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

. The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding. It ranges from U+0000 to U+007F, contains 128 characters and includes the C0 controls, ASCII

punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...

and

symbol A symbol is a mark, Sign (semiotics), sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, physical object, object, or wikt:relationship, relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by cr ...

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

digits, both the

uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''#Majuscule, majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally ''#Minuscule, minuscule'') in the written representation of certain langua ...

and

lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...

of the

English alphabet Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 Letter (alphabet), letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word ''alphabet'' is a Compound (linguistics), compound of ''alpha'' and ''beta'', t ...

and a

control character In computing and telecommunications, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point in a character encoding, character set that does not represent a written Character (computing), character or symbol. They are used as in-ba ...

. The Basic Latin block was included in its present form from version 1.0.0 of the Unicode Standard, without addition or alteration of the character repertoire. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was ASCII.

Table of characters

: The letter U+005C (\) may show up as a Yen(¥) or Won(₩) sign in Japanese/Korean fonts mistaking Unicode (especially

) as a legacy character set which replaced the backslash with these signs.

Subheadings

The C0 Controls and Basic Latin block contains six subheadings.

C0 controls

The C0 Controls, referred to as C0 ASCII control codes in version 1.0, are inherited from ASCII and other 7-bit and 8-bit encoding schemes. The Alias names for C0 controls are taken from the ISO/IEC 6429:1992 standard.

ASCII punctuation and symbols

This subheading refers to standard punctuation characters, simple mathematical operators, and symbols like the dollar sign, percent, ampersand, underscore, and pipe.

ASCII digits

The ASCII Digits subheading contains the standard European number characters 1–9 and 0.

Uppercase Latin alphabet

The Uppercase Latin alphabet subheading contains the standard 26-letter unaccented Latin alphabet in the

majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally '' majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing syste ...

Lowercase Latin alphabet

The Lowercase Latin Alphabet subheading contains the standard 26-letter unaccented Latin alphabet in the minuscule.

Control character

The Control Character subheading contains the "Delete" character.

Number of symbols, letters and control codes

The table below shows the number of letters, symbols and control codes in each of the subheadings in the C0 Controls and Basic Latin block.

Chart

Variants

Several of the characters are defined to render as a standardized variant if followed by variant indicators. A variant is defined for a zero with a short diagonal stroke: U+0030 DIGIT ZERO, U+FE00 VS1 (0︀). Twelve characters (#, *, and the digits) can be followed by U+FE0E VS15 or U+FE0F VS16 to create

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

variants. They are keycap base characters, for example #️⃣ (U+0023 NUMBER SIGN U+FE0F VS16 U+20E3 COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP). The VS15 version is "text presentation" while the VS16 version is "emoji-style".

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Basic Latin block:

References

External links

{{authority control Latin-script Unicode blocks Unicode blocks