What is a Unicode code point?

A code point is the numeric identity Unicode assigns to a character, written like U+0041 for the letter A. It is independent of how the character is stored in bytes, which is what UTF-8 or UTF-16 decide.

Does it handle emoji and astral characters?

Yes. The tool iterates real code points, so a character above U+FFFF such as an emoji is reported as a single code point rather than as the two UTF-16 surrogate halves.

What is the difference between a code point and a code unit?

A code unit is a fixed-size storage piece — 16 bits in UTF-16, 8 bits in UTF-8. A single code point can need several code units. This tool reports code points, the logical characters.

Which notation should I use?

Use U+XXXX for documentation and Unicode references, hexadecimal 0x form for many programming contexts, and decimal when an API or data format expects raw integers.

Why do some characters show as combined?

Some visible glyphs are made of a base character plus combining marks, each its own code point. The tool lists each code point separately, which is the accurate low-level view even if they render as one symbol.

UTF-8 to Unicode Code Points

From text to code points

This tool breaks a string into the individual Unicode code points behind it. Where a byte-counter cares about storage and an editor cares about glyphs, this view shows the logical characters Unicode actually assigns numbers to — useful when debugging encoding issues, building escape sequences, or inspecting mysterious whitespace.

How it works

JavaScript strings are stored as UTF-16, so a naive character loop would split astral characters (anything above U+FFFF, like most emoji) into two surrogate halves. To avoid that, the tool iterates the string with a code-point-aware loop and reads each character’s codePointAt(0). Each value is then formatted in the notation you choose:

U+XXXX  -> "U+" + hex, upper-case, zero-padded to 4 digits
0x form -> "0x" + hex
decimal -> the plain integer

For example the earth emoji is the single code point U+1F30D, not the surrogate pair U+D83C U+DF0D that UTF-16 would store it as.

Tips and notes

If a single visible symbol reports as several code points, it is almost certainly a base letter plus combining diacritical marks, or an emoji built from a zero-width-joiner sequence — both are legitimate multi-code-point clusters. Use the U+XXXX notation when writing documentation or looking characters up in the Unicode charts, and decimal when feeding an API that wants integers. To go the other way, use the companion code-points-to-UTF-8 tool.