Question: I'm giving a tech talk about Unicode and encoding in my company, in which I'm trying to make the point that [strings are always encoded](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html), and developers should never carelessly assume that everything is 0-127 ASCII.

I have numerous examples of problems caused by mis-encoded text, but I didn't find any example of simple English text with numbers that's encoded above Unicode [code point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_point) 127.

The basic English alphabet is mapped in Unicode to the same numerical value as the plain old ASCII: The range `A-Z` is mapped to `[65-90]` (or `[0x41-0x5a]` in hex), and `[a-z]` is mapped to `[97-122]` (hex `[0x61-0x7a]`).

**Does the English alphabet appear elsewhere in the code charts?** I do not mean [circumflex letters or other Latin variants](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C1_Controls_and_Latin-1_Supplement), just the plain English alphabet.

Answer: 
CJK characters are generally monospaced in all fonts, since that's how those languages tend to be written.

When mixing CJK and English characters, however, you run into a problem: ASCII characters do not in general have the width of a CJK character. This means that if you use ASCII, you lose the monospaced property - which may not always be desirable.

For this purpose, ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈ　ｃｈａｒａｃｔｅｒｓ (U+FF00-FFEE, [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms), [Unicode code chart](http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFF00.pdf)) may be used in place of "regular" characters. These have the property that they have the same width as a single CJK character.

Note, however, that fullwidth characters are virtually never used outside of a CJK context, and even in those contexts, plain ASCII is frequently used as well, when monospacing is considered unimportant.
Plenty of punctuation and symbols have code point values above U+007F:

> 
> * “Hello.”
> * He had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look.
> * x ≠ y
> 
> 
> 

The above examples use:

* U+201C and U+201D — smart quotes
* U+2014 — em-dash
* U+2260 — not equal to

See the [Unicode charts](http://unicode.org/charts/) for more.