As a result, the Unicode Transformation Format 8 (UTF-8) encoding supports 2 31 code points, with most characters in the current Unicode character set requiring generally one or two bytes each.

I've come to view unicode as a trojan horse that solves glyph representation to the point where it simply becomes dreadfully obvious that your software isn't really internationalized at all.

when I have like the funny left quote character, unicode code point of 201C I understand and see from xxd and this site, that the stored hex of that is ...

Code points are written in the format 'U+XXXX,' where the 'U+' indicates that it is Unicode, and the 'XXXX' that follows indicates the code point in hexadecimal notation.

Unicode has many code points that have visually different representations of the same character. For example, the image below shows all visually different representations of 'X'.