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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.
HTML and XML provide ways to reference Unicode characters when the characters themselves either cannot or should not be used. A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the ...
UTF-8 (originally developed for Plan 9) [82] has become the main storage encoding on most Unix-like operating systems (though others are also used by some libraries) because it is a relatively easy replacement for traditional extended ASCII character sets. UTF-8 is also the most common Unicode encoding used in HTML documents on the World Wide Web.
Due to Unicode's extensive documentation, vast repertoire of characters and stability policy of characters, the problems listed above are rarely a concern for Unicode. UTF-8 (which can encode over one million codepoints) has replaced the code-page method in terms of popularity on the Internet.
A code point is represented by a sequence of code units. The mapping is defined by the encoding. Thus, the number of code units required to represent a code point depends on the encoding: UTF-8: code points map to a sequence of one, two, three or four code units. UTF-16: code units are twice as long as 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.
This encoding may either be a Unicode Transformation Format, like UTF-8, that can directly encode any Unicode character, or a legacy encoding, like Windows-1252, that cannot. However, even when using encodings that do not support all Unicode characters, the encoded document may make use of numeric character references.