Ascii to unicode converter

This browser-based utility reinterprets sequences of ASCII and ANSI characters as Unicode data. The ASCII encoding uses only 7 bits and supports only 95 printable characters. The most popular Unicode encoding that most browsers implement uses a variable-width encoding from 7 to 21 bits and supports 1,100,000 printable characters. As the simplest characters (a-z, A-Z, numbers, and punctuation marks) use the same amount of bits (7 bits) in both ASCII and Unicode, they are left unchanged in the encoding process. All other Unicode characters are displayed as two, three, or four broken ANSI characters because the ASCII encoding doesn't support multi-byte values. To determine how many bytes each output Unicode symbol uses, we convert the broken input text to binary base and look at the first few beginning bits. This bit pattern tells us how many bytes to consume to create a Unicode glyph. Single-byte Unicode glyphs have the high bit set to zero. What that means is they start with the 0-bit and look like "0bbbbbbb", where "b" is any bit value. So a single byte Unicode glyph matches the same ASCII glyph. Double-byte glyphs start with the pattern "110bbbbb", followed by "10bbbbbb". The total number of free bits in double-byte glyphs is eleven (five in the first byte and six in the second byte). Triple-byte glyphs start with the pattern "1110bbbb", followed by two "10bbbbbb" patterns. In this case, the number of usable bits is sixteen (four in the first byte and six in bytes two and three). Quadruple-byte glyphs start with the pattern "11110bbb" and are followed by three patterns of "01bbbbbb". The total number of bits, in this case, is twenty-one (three in the first byte and six in each of the other three bytes). When we combine these one-, two-, three-, or four-byte sequences together and let the browser decode them to its default encoding, we get valid Unicode characters.