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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 Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (plus amendments to that standard), which is the basis of many character encodings, improving as characters from previously unrepresented writing systems are added.
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]
Microsoft was one of the first companies to implement Unicode in their products. Windows NT was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in system calls.Using the (now obsolete) UCS-2 encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to the variable-width encoding UTF-16 starting with Windows 2000, allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs.
Unicode, in the form of UTF-8, has been the most common encoding for the World Wide Web since 2008. [77] It has near-universal adoption, and much of the non-UTF-8 content is found in other Unicode encodings, e.g. UTF-16. As of 2024, UTF-8 accounts for on average 98.3% of all web pages (and 983 of the top 1,000 highest-ranked web pages). [78]
For UTF-8, the BOM is optional, while it is a must for the UTF-16 and the UTF-32 encodings. (Note: UTF-16 and UTF-32 without the BOM are formally known under different names, they are different encodings, and thus needs some form of encoding declaration – see UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32LE and UTF-32BE.) The use of the BOM character (U+FEFF ...
To use Unicode in certain email header fields, e.g. subject lines, sender and recipient names, the Unicode text has to be encoded using a MIME "Encoded-Word" with a Unicode encoding as the charset. To use Unicode in the domain part of email addresses, IDNA encoding must traditionally be used. Alternatively, SMTPUTF8 [3] allows the use of UTF-8 ...