The CIM string datatype consists of a number of UCS-2 characters .
UCS-2 is based on the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of ISO/IEC 10646 and is basically a 16-bit encoding of a large number of Unicode characters ”international alphabetic characters and symbols. UCS-2 includes the well-known ASCII characters as a sub-set, mapping them to their "normal" ASCII equivalent values, but also contains a large number of European and Asiatic characters.
Thus a capital 'A' is encoded as 0x0041 as it would be in ASCII. The Greek letter ² , on the other hand, does not appear in the ASCII character set but does in UCS-2 ”as the encoding 0x03B2.
Strings within CIM are composed of UCS-2 characters rather than ASCII characters.
More information about UCS-2 and Unicode can be found on the Web site of the Unicode Consortium ( http://www.unicode.org/ ); see also the glossary entry in this book for Unicode.