CSA Preface 

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). This Standard supersedes CSA ISO/IEC 10646:20 (adopted ISO/IEC 10646:2017). At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 10646:2020 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA Group will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC. 

This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been developed in compliance with Standards Council of Canada requirements for National Standards of Canada. It has been published as a National Standard of Canada by CSA Group. 

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.