Unicode: Surrogate Pair

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

What is Surrogate Pair

Surrogate Pair is a mechanism in UTF-16 Encoding to represent one single character using two Code Points.

Surrogate Pair is used to represent characters whose code point is greater than U+FFFF (decimal 65535. That is 2^16 - 1).

Surrogate Pair is a sequence of two Surrogate Code Points: A High-Surrogate code point followed by a Low-Surrogate code point.

Surrogate Code Point Range

startend
High-SurrogateU+D800 (decimal 55296)U+DBFF (decimal 56319)
Low-SurrogateU+DC00 (decimal 56320)U+DFFF (decimal 57343)

Surrogate Code Points never represent any character

A Surrogate Code Point never represent any character by itself.

Unicode and Encoding Explained