Editing Code page (section)

=== Relationship to Unicode ===
Unicode is an effort to include all characters from all currently and historically used human languages into single character enumeration (effectively one large single code page), removing the need to distinguish between different code pages when handling digitally stored text. Unicode tries to retain backwards compatibility with many legacy code pages, copying some code pages 1:1 in the design process. An explicit design goal of Unicode was to allow round-trip conversion between all common legacy code pages, although this goal has not always been achieved.
Some vendors, namely IBM and Microsoft, have anachronistically assigned code page numbers to Unicode encodings. This convention allows code page numbers to be used as metadata to identify the correct decoding algorithm when encountering binary stored data.