This section provides introductions on what is a character encoding - A map scheme between code points of a code character set and sequences of bytes.
Character Encoding: A map scheme between code points of a code character
set and sequences of bytes.
Coded Character Set: A character set in which each character has an
assigned a code point (i.e. an integral number).
Code Point: An integral number assigned to a character in a coded character set.
Unicode: A coded character set that contains all characters used
in the written languages of the world and special symbols.
As of 1.4.1, J2SDK supports Unicode 3.0, based on the information provided
in the reference document of java.lang.Character class.
I don't how JDK is going to support Unicode 3.1, because it now contains characters
with code points greater than U+FFFF, which is the maximum value of 'char' type in Java.
Because of the 'char' limitation, JDK can only support encoding and decoding code points
in the 16-bit range: U+0000 - U+FFFF.
