Code point

In UTF-8, the number of bytes used to write a character to a file depends on the Unicode code point.

A code point is one entry in the Unicode character database. A code point is not the same as a character, depending on the meaning you give to “character.” What appears as a character on screen is called a grapheme in Unicode.

Today, Unicode defines 1,112,064 code points, far exceeding the 2-byte capacity originally set aside for Unicode characters. A Unicode code point is simply an integer value that Unicode associates with a particular character symbol; you can think of it as the Unicode equivalent of the ASCII code for a character.