Mathematica has efficient systemwide 16-bit Unicode support, allowing a full range of international, technical and other character sets and character encodings.
Characters — the list of characters in a string
StringJoin — join characters to form a string
ToCharacterCode — convert a string to a list of character codes
FromCharacterCode — convert from a list of character codes to a string
CharacterRange — give a range of characters with successive character codes
CharacterEncoding — specify a character encoding ("ANSI", "UTF8", "ShiftJIS", ...)
$CharacterEncoding — list of installed character encodings on a computer system
ToString,
ToExpression — convert between arbitrary expressions and strings
