You use Unicode when your MDriven application must represent text consistently, including accented characters, non-English letters, symbols, and emoji.

What Unicode defines

Unicode is a computing industry standard for representing and processing text. It defines a set of characters and assigns each character a unique number. This lets different systems identify the same character consistently.

For example, a value can contain characters such as:

• Accented letters: á, é, and ó
• Non-English letters
• Emoji: 😊

Unicode identifies the characters. An encoding defines how those characters are represented when stored or sent as data. See Encoding.

Unicode and encodings

When you exchange text with another system, both sides must use a compatible encoding. The encoding is especially important for text that is not limited to basic English letters and numbers.

For example, if you export the text Café 😊, the receiving system needs to interpret the encoded data correctly to preserve é and 😊.

Topic	What it means	When it matters
Unicode	The character standard: characters have unique identifiers.	You need to support text from different languages, symbols, or emoji.
Encoding	The representation used to store or transfer Unicode text.	You export text to a file, API, or other external system.
UTF-8	A variable-length Unicode Transformation Format that can represent all Unicode code points.	An external system requires UTF-8 text.
UTF-32	A fixed-length Unicode Transformation Format that represents each Unicode code point as a 32-bit integer.	You need a fixed-length representation and accept its larger memory use for simple text.

Choose the required encoding for integrations

Follow the encoding requirement of the receiving system.

1. Identify the encoding required by the file format, API, or external system.
2. Keep the value as text while you work with it in MDriven.
3. Apply the encoding required for the transfer.
4. Test with text that includes characters beyond basic English, such as Café 😊.
5. Verify that the receiving system displays the same characters after import or transfer.

For UTF-8-specific guidance, see Documentation:OCLOperators UTF8. For other Unicode encodings, see Documentation:OCLOperators UTF32, Documentation:OCLOperators BigEndianUnicode, and Documentation:OCLOperators UTF7.

Text conversion and string operations

Use the operation that matches the task:

• Use StringToEncodedBase64 when you must convert a string using a specified encoding and represent the result as Base64. This is relevant when non-Unicode data would otherwise cause problems in a string value.
• Use Size() to return the number of characters composing a string.
• Use ToUpper() to return a string with its characters converted to uppercase.

Character conversion and character count are separate concerns from selecting the encoding used to exchange the text.

See also

• Encoding
• Documentation:OCLOperators UTF8
• Documentation:OCLOperators UTF32
• Documentation:OCLOperators BigEndianUnicode
• Documentation:OCLOperators StringToEncodedBase64