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Only a small subset of possible byte strings are error-free UTF-8: several bytes cannot appear; a byte with the high bit set cannot be alone; and in a truly random string a byte with a high bit set has only a 1 ⁄ 15 chance of starting a valid UTF-8 character. This has the (possibly unintended) consequence of making it easy to detect if a ...
For instance, it is impossible to fix an invalid UTF-8 filename using a UTF-16 API, as no possible UTF-16 string will translate to that invalid filename. The opposite is not true: it is trivial to translate invalid UTF-16 to a unique (though technically invalid) UTF-8 string, so a UTF-8 API can control both UTF-8 and UTF-16 files and names ...
The same character converted to UTF-8 becomes the byte sequence EF BB BF. The Unicode Standard allows the BOM "can serve as a signature for UTF-8 encoded text where the character set is unmarked". [75] Some software developers have adopted it for other encodings, including UTF-8, in an attempt to distinguish UTF-8 from local 8-bit code pages.
So newer software systems are starting to use UTF-8. The default string primitive used in newer programing languages, such as Go, [18] Julia, Rust and Swift 5, [19] assume UTF-8 encoding. PyPy also uses UTF-8 for its strings, [20] and Python is looking into storing all strings with UTF-8. [21]
[6] [7] [8] The Encoding Standard further stipulates that new formats, new protocols (even when existing formats are used) and authors of new documents are required to use UTF-8 exclusively. [9] Besides UTF-8, the following encodings are explicitly listed in the HTML standard itself, with reference to the Encoding Standard: [8]
Current Windows versions and all back to Windows XP and prior Windows NT (3.x, 4.0) are shipped with system libraries that support string encoding of two types: 16-bit "Unicode" (UTF-16 since Windows 2000) and a (sometimes multibyte) encoding called the "code page" (or incorrectly referred to as ANSI code page). 16-bit functions have names suffixed with 'W' (from "wide") such as SetWindowTextW.
The change was made "to clear the way for the potential future use of tag characters for a purpose other than to represent language tags". [8] Unicode states that "the use of tag characters to represent language tags in a plain text stream is still a deprecated mechanism for conveying language information about text. [8]
Although not strictly required, UTF-8 is usually also transfer encoded to avoid problems across seven-bit mail servers. MIME transfer encoding of UTF-8 makes it either unreadable as a plain text (in the case of base64) or, for some languages and types of text, heavily size inefficient (in the case of quoted-printable).