A UTF-8 file that contains only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file. Legacy programs can generally handle UTF-8 encoded files, even if they contain non-ASCII characters. For instance, the C printf function … See more

UTF-16 and UTF-32 do not have endianness defined, so a byte order must be selected when receiving them over a byte-oriented network or reading them from a byte … See more

The tables below list the number of bytes per code point for different Unicode ranges. Any additional comments needed are included in the table. The figures assume that overheads at the start and end of the block of text are negligible.
N.B. The tables … See more

UTF-8 requires 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits (one to four bytes) to encode a Unicode character, UTF-16 requires either 16 or 32 bits to encode a character, … See more

For processing, a format should be easy to search, truncate, and generally process safely. All normal Unicode encodings use some form of fixed size code unit. Depending on the format and the code point to be encoded, one or more of these code units will … See more