UTF-8: Difference between revisions
Content added Content deleted
m (Added to the encyclopedia.) |
m (Replaced encyclopedic tag) |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
[[Category:Encyclopedia]]'''Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit representation''' or UTF-8 is a particular encoding of [[Unicode]] code-points into eight-bit octets. It was originally developed for Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system by Ken Thompson (inventor of Unix) and Rob Pike in 1992. It is widely used on Unix-like systems and for XML documents. |
|||
Some advantages of UTF-8: |
Some advantages of UTF-8: |
||
Revision as of 04:18, 22 January 2008
Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit representation or UTF-8 is a particular encoding of Unicode code-points into eight-bit octets. It was originally developed for Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system by Ken Thompson (inventor of Unix) and Rob Pike in 1992. It is widely used on Unix-like systems and for XML documents.
Some advantages of UTF-8:
- byte-order independent
- subsumes 7-bit ASCII
- one can detect the start of characters
- can encode code-points at least 32-bits long
Challenges:
- characters do not have a fixed size. One needs to walk an entire string to determine the character length of a string.
- biased towards European scripts. Japanese code points are more compactly stored in other encodings, such as UTF-16 or UCS-2.