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Rather, older 8-bit encodings such as ASCII or ISO-8859-1 are still used, forgoing Unicode support entirely, or UTF-8 is used for Unicode. [citation needed] One rare counter-example is the "strings" file introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, which is used by applications to lookup internationalized versions of messages. By default, this file is ...
UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit. [1] Almost every webpage is stored in UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,064 [2] valid code points using a variable-width encoding of one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units.
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". [76] 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.
While ASCII is limited to 128 characters, Unicode and the UCS support more characters by separating the concepts of unique identification (using natural numbers called code points) and encoding (to 8-, 16-, or 32-bit binary formats, called UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, respectively).
In modern times, Unicode has replaced almost all uses of non-ASCII encodings. Because many Internet standards use ISO 8859-1, and because Microsoft Windows (for most languages used in Western Europe and the Americas) uses the CP1252 superset of ISO 8859-1, in general it is safe to assume that any byte stream that is not valid UTF-8 is in CP1252 ...
In 1973, ECMA-35 and ISO 2022 [18] attempted to define a method so an 8-bit "extended ASCII" code could be converted to a corresponding 7-bit code, and vice versa. [19] In a 7-bit environment, the Shift Out would change the meaning of the 96 bytes 0x20 through 0x7F [a] [21] (i.e. all but the C0 control codes), to be the characters that an 8-bit environment would print if it used the same code ...
Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with pre-existing standard character sets , which often included similar or identical characters.
Over time, character encodings capable of representing more characters were created, such as ASCII, the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings, various computer vendor encodings, and Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. The most popular character encoding on the World Wide Web is UTF-8, which is used in 98.2% of surveyed web sites, as of May 2024. [2]