Should I use UTF-8 or UTF-16?

Should I use UTF-8 or UTF-16?

Depends on the language of your data. If your data is mostly in western languages and you want to reduce the amount of storage needed, go with UTF-8 as for those languages it will take about half the storage of UTF-16.

What is the advantage of using UTF-8 instead of UTF-16?

UTF-16 is, obviously, more efficient for A) characters for which UTF-16 requires fewer bytes to encode than does UTF-8. UTF-8 is, obviously, more efficient for B) characters for which UTF-8 requires fewer bytes to encode than does UTF-16.

Is UTF-16 backwards compatible with UTF-8?

When using ASCII only characters, a UTF-16 encoded file would be roughly twice as big as the same file encoded with UTF-8. The main advantage of UTF-8 is that it is backwards compatible with ASCII. Legacy software that is not Unicode aware would be unable to open the UTF-16 file even if it only had ASCII characters.

What is the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-8?

There is no official difference between UTF-8 and BOM-ed UTF-8. A BOM-ed UTF-8 string will start with the three following bytes.

Why is UTF-16 bad?

UTF-16 is indeed the “worst of both worlds”: UTF8 is variable-length, covers all of Unicode, requires a transformation algorithm to and from raw codepoints, restricts to ASCII, and it has no endianness issues. UTF32 is fixed-length, requires no transformation, but takes up more space and has endianness issues.

Is UTF-16 obsolete?

UCS-2 is obsolete and replaced by UTF-16, which is more powerful, and more efficient (potentially fewer bytes for same number of characters). UCS-2 is fixed width, UTF-16 is variable width with a minimum of two bytes and a maximum of four bytes.

Why is UTF-8 widely adopted on the Web?

Why use UTF-8? An HTML page can only be in one encoding. You cannot encode different parts of a document in different encodings. A Unicode-based encoding such as UTF-8 can support many languages and can accommodate pages and forms in any mixture of those languages.

Is UTF-16 same as Unicode?

UTF-16 is an encoding of Unicode in which each character is composed of either one or two 16-bit elements. Unicode was originally designed as a pure 16-bit encoding, aimed at representing all modern scripts.

Can UTF-8 handle Chinese characters?

2 Answers. UTF-8 and UTF-16 encode exactly the same set of characters. It’s not that UTF-8 doesn’t cover Chinese characters and UTF-16 does.

What is UTF-16 BOM?

UTF-16. In UTF-16, a BOM ( U+FEFF ) may be placed as the first character of a file or character stream to indicate the endianness (byte order) of all the 16-bit code units of the file or stream.

Does UTF-16 require BOM?

The LE and BE variants do not have a BOM. For UTF-16: The UTF-16 encoding scheme may or may not begin with a BOM. However, when there is no BOM, and in the absence of a higher-level protocol, the byte order of the UTF-16 encoding scheme is big-endian.

Should I always use UTF-8?

The answer is that UTF-8 is by far the best general-purpose data interchange encoding, and is almost mandatory if you are using any of the other protocols that build on it (mail, XML, HTML, etc). However, UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding and relatively new, so there are lots of situations where it is a poor choice.

What is the difference between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1?

ISO-8859-1 uses a single byte to represent each character in this range whereas UTF-8 uses two bytes to represent each character in this range. ISO-8859-1 does not support any character mappings above the FF encoding value, whereas UTF-8 continues supporting encodings represented by 2, 3, and 4 byte values.

Is UTF-16 fixed-width or variable-width?

UCS-2 is a fixed width encoding that uses two bytes for each character; meaning, it can represent up to a total of 216 characters or slightly over 65 thousand. On the other hand, UTF-16 is a variable width encoding scheme that uses a minimum of 2 bytes and a maximum of 4 bytes for each character. This lets UTF-16 represent any character in Unicode while using minimal space for the most commonly used characters.

What is the difference between “UTF-16” and “STD?

UTF-16 is a concept of text represented in 16-bit elements but an actual textual character may consist of more than one element. std::wstring is just a collection of these elements, and is a class primarily concerned with their storage. The elements in a wstring, wchar_t is at least 16-bits but could be 32 bits.

What is the full form of UTF-8?

UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from Unicode (or Universal Coded Character Set) Transformation Format – 8-bit. UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to four one- byte (8-bit) code units.