To be technical, by "character" I mean "user-perceived character" or (in Unicode speak) "extended grapheme cluster". This is the thing a user will think of as o

To be technical, by "character" I mean "user-perceived character" or (in Unicode speak) "extended grapheme cluster". This is the thing a user will think of as one character when looking at it on their screen. A code point is the atomic unit of the abstract Unicode encoding. By "abstract" I mean it is not an actual text encoding you can write to a file. A code unit is the atomic unit of an actual text encoding, such as UTF-8, UTF-16LE or UTF-32LE (and their BE equivalents). --- So to put it together a "user-perceived character" is made up of one or more "code points". When implemented in an application, each "code point" is encoded using one or more "code units".