Technology and data formats
Unicode
In short and in plain language
Unicode is a big list of letters and signs.
Each letter or sign in it has its own number. It covers almost all languages.
Other rules say how the numbers are stored.
If all programs use Unicode, names with accents mostly come out right.
Definition
Unicode is an international standard that assigns a unique number to the characters of almost all languages. An encoding defines how these numbers are stored as bytes. Systems that use Unicode throughout can, as a rule, exchange names with accents and special characters unchanged.