Information technology - Universal coded character set (UCS)

CSA Group
Standards Development Organisation:
Canadian Standards Association (operating as CSA Group)
Working Program:
View the CSA work program
Designation Number:
ISO/IEC 10646
Standard Type:
National Standard of Canada - Adoption of International Standard
Standard Development Activity:
New Edition
ICS code(s):
35.040.10
Status:
Proceeding to development
SDO Comment Period Start Date:
SDO Comment Period End Date:
Posted On:

Scope:

This document

— specifies the architecture of the UCS;
— defines terms used for the UCS;
— describes the general structure of the UCS codespace;
— specifies the assigned planes of the UCS: the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of the UCS, the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP), the Supplementary Ideographic Plane (SIP), the Tertiary Ideographic Plane (TIP), and the Supplementary Special-purpose Plane (SSP);
— defines a set of graphic characters used in scripts and the written form of languages on a world-wide scale;
— specifies the names for the graphic characters and format characters of the BMP, SMP, SIP, TIP, SSP and their coded representations within the UCS codespace;
— specifies the coded representations for control characters and private use characters;
— specifies three encoding forms of the UCS: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32;
— specifies seven encoding schemes of the UCS: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, and UTF-32LE;
— specifies the management of future additions to this coded character set.

NOTE – The determination of suitability of these characters for use as identifiers in programming languages is not specified by this document but can be found in an external reference. See Annex U.

Project need:

To align Canadian requirements with those of the respective international standards being proposed for adoption. To maintain alignment between Canadian information and communication technology standards and each respective international standard.

Note: The information provided above was obtained by the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) and is provided as part of a centralized, transparent notification system for new standards development. The system allows SCC-accredited Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), and members of the public, to be informed of new work in Canadian standards development, and allows SCC-accredited SDOs to identify and resolve potential duplication of standards and effort.

Individual SDOs are responsible for the content and accuracy of the information presented here. The text is presented in the language in which it was provided to SCC.