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Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile

Computerphile

2.6M subscribers • 70 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2024.
  • Presented by Tom Scott, presenter

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

2.1M views13 years ago4 recommendations

Computer scienceSystems programmingData structuresNetworking and protocols

Tom Scott explains how Unicode and the UTF-8 encoding standard solved the historical mess of character representation on the web.

Audible free book: audible.com/computerphile Representing symbols, characters and letters that are used worldwide is no mean feat, but unicode managed it - how? Tom Scott explains how the web has settled on a standard. More from Tom Scott: youtube.com/user/enyay and twitter.com/tomscott EXTRA BITS: youtu.be/qBex3IDaUbU Data Security: youtu.be/4SSSMi4X_mA facebook.com/computerphile twitter.com/computer_phile This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley. Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. See the full list of Brady's video projects at: bit.ly/bradychannels

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Widely recommended as the clearest and most engaging explanation of how Unicode and UTF-8 work.

doucheon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Falsehoods programmers believe about time and time zones”

That is one of my all-time favorite youtube videos... This one, and a similar one on unicode1, are my goto exhibits when I need to illustrate to a non-technical family member how much background complexity is involved in software 1 link to this video
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wcarsson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Unicode in five minutes (2013)”

Something complementary -- because this article just takes a moment to talk about the different encoding schemes -- a wonderful, terse, very informative video describing how utf-8 encoding works and why (with a little history) by Tom Scott/Computerphile: link to this video
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janvdbergon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]”

Tom is why I understand UTF-8 1. And it is not so much WHAT he explained but HOW he explained it, what really made it stick. It was his sheer unbridled genuine enthusiasm that put him on the map for me. One of the best to do it. 1 link to this video
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mcphilipon Hacker News • Recommends

On “LHC Physics Center bans Powerpoint, switches to whiteboard-only forums”

I love Numberphile too and recently stumbled on Computerphile. The style is the same for both shows -- a passionate person explaining something reasonably complex. For instance, I like Computerphile's video on the evolution of character encoding and why UTF was developed. link to this video
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u/EpochVanquisherin r/C_Programming • Mentions

On “Want to understand the logic behind the execution.”

There are a million things to learn, but there’s no hurry. Focus on core programming for now, and maybe take a look at things like Wikipedia or watch YouTube videos for some additional content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII [video
3View on Reddit

janvdbergon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike (2003)”

More or less same the story but in an explainer video: 'Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile' link to this video
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Rendelloon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What are your Unicode woes?”

That tripped me up too. The Unicode Core spec is quite good at explaining things and introduces some terminology you don't really hear outside the document. Chapter 2, General Structure , is worth reading in its entirety. I've linked some bits that might help: > *2.2.3 Characters, Not Glyphs* > The Unicode Standard draws a distinction between characters and glyphs. Characters are the abstract representations of the smallest components of written language that have semantic value. They represent primarily, but not exclusively, the letters, punctuation, and other signs that constitute natural language text and technical notation. ... Letters in different scripts, even when they correspond ei…
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u/Aypahyoin r/C_Programming • Mentions

On “How can something be >= 'a'?”

So Ascii-7 is wildly understood. the code goes back to before computers were a real thing. Essentially computers use numbers so 'A' needs to be made into a number. There is a good mapping here for the bits for the integer range from 0 to 127 Here is Tom Scott explaining a lot about it all: link to this video link to this video Do not assume anything above integer 128, it all falls apart there. You can do reasonable things with that and evil things. Here is an assortment of reasonable and evil things: #include <iostream> int main() { int lolower= 'b' - 'B'; std::cout << "upper case " << ('A') << " is lower case " << ('A' + lolower) << "\n"; std::cout << "letter " << ('A') << " has a value of " <<…
1View on Reddit

user2805335on Stack Overflow • Mentions

I am currently using the following script in Tampermonkey in Google Chrome: // ==UserScript== // @name Youtube opt in Ads per channel // @namespace schippi // @include link to this video // @version 1 // ==/UserScript== var u = window.location.href; if (u.search("user=") == -1) { var cont = document.getElementById("watch7-user-header").innerHTML; var user=cont.replace(/.+\/user\//i,'').replace(/\?(?:.|\s)*/m,''); window.location.href = u+"&user="+user; } It seems to work perfectly in Firefox with Greasemonkey but in Google Chrome, it seems that it only works on the first click on a YouTube video. More specifically, if I click on a YouTube video:    link to this video, it redirects me to:    link to this video…
1View the answer