Concise term for non-ASCII Unicode characters

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Sun Sep 20 11:52:29 CDT 2015


You already have been using "non-ASCII Unicode", which is about as concise and sufficiently accurate as you'll get. There's no term specifically defined in any standard or conventionally used for this.


Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Sean Leonard
Sent: Sunday, September 20, 2015 7:48 AM
To: unicode at unicode.org
Subject: Concise term for non-ASCII Unicode characters

What is the most concise term for characters or code points outside of the US-ASCII range (U+0000 - U+007F)? Sometimes I have referred to these as "extended characters" or "non-ASCII Unicode" but I do not find those terms precise. We are talking about the code points U+0080 - U+10FFFF. I suppose that this also refers to code points/scalar values that are not formally Unicode characters, such as U+FFFF. Basically, I am looking for a concise term for values that would require multiple UTF-8 octets if encoded in UTF-8 (without referring to UTF-8 encoding specifically). 
"Non-ASCII" is not precise enough since character sets like Shift-JIS are non-ASCII.

Also a citation to a relevant standard (whether Unicode or otherwise) would be helpful.

The terms "supplementary character" and "supplementary code point" are defined in the Unicode standard, referring to characters or code points above U+FFFF. I am looking for something like those, but for characters or code points above U+007F.

Thank you,

Sean



More information about the Unicode mailing list