Book excerpt: Unicode is a critical enabling technology for developers who want to internationalize applications for global environments. But, until now, developers have had to turn to standards documents for crucial information on utilizing Unicode. In Unicode Demystified, one of IBM's leading software internationalization experts covers every key aspect of Unicode development, offering practical examples and detailed guidance for integrating Unicode 3.0 into virtually any application or environment. Writing from a developer's point of view, Rich Gillam presents a systematic introduction to Unicode's goals, evolution, and key elements. Gillam illuminates the Unicode standards documents with insightful discussions of character properties, the Unicode character database, storage formats, character sequences, Unicode normalization, character encoding conversion, and more. He presents practical techniques for text processing, locating text boundaries, searching, sorting, rendering text, accepting user input, and other key development tasks. Along the way, he offers specific guidance on integrating Unicode with other technologies, including Java, JavaScript, XML, and the Web. For every developer building internationalized applications, internationalizing existing applications, or interfacing with systems that already utilize Unicode.