code point

plural code points · alternative codepoint

1. especially UnicodecomputingA numerical offset in a character set, etc., as opposed to a displayed grapheme or character, which can be composed of several code points.

   In UTF-8, the number of bytes used to write a character to a file depends on the Unicode code point.

   2 more examples

   A code point is one entry in the Unicode character database. A code point is not the same as a character, depending on the meaning you give to “character.” What appears as a character on screen is called a grapheme in Unicode.

   2009, Jan Goyvaerts, Steven Levithan, Regular Expressions Cookbook, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 45

   Today, Unicode defines 1,112,064 code points, far exceeding the 2-byte capacity originally set aside for Unicode characters. A Unicode code point is simply an integer value that Unicode associates with a particular character symbol; you can think of it as the Unicode equivalent of the ASCII code for a character.

   2020, Randall Hyde, Write Great Code, 2nd edition, volume 1, No Starch Press, →ISBN, page 102

   Synonyms: code position