Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
For example, 32 contiguous bits may be treated as an array of 32 Booleans, a 4-byte string, an unsigned 32-bit integer or an IEEE single precision floating point value. Because the stored bits are never changed, the programmer must know low level details such as representation format, byte order, and alignment needs, to meaningfully cast.
A wide character refers to the size of the datatype in memory. It does not state how each value in a character set is defined. Those values are instead defined using character sets, with UCS and Unicode simply being two common character sets that encode more characters than an 8-bit wide numeric value (255 total) would allow.
Eventually, as 8-, 16-, and 32-bit (and later 64-bit) computers began to replace 12-, 18-, and 36-bit computers as the norm, it became common to use an 8-bit byte to store each character in memory, providing an opportunity for extended, 8-bit relatives of ASCII. In most cases these developed as true extensions of ASCII, leaving the original ...
A UTF-8 file that contains only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file. Legacy programs can generally handle UTF-8 encoded files, even if they contain non-ASCII characters. For instance, the C printf function can print a UTF-8 string because it only looks for the ASCII '%' character to define a formatting string. All other bytes are ...
Although many pages only use ASCII characters to display content, very few websites now declare their encoding to only be ASCII instead of UTF-8. [29] Virtually all countries and languages have 95% or more use of UTF-8 encodings on the web. Many standards only support UTF-8, e.g. JSON exchange requires it (without a byte-order mark (BOM)). [30]
The variable length character of UTF-16, combined with the fact that most characters are not variable length (so variable length is rarely tested), has led to many bugs in software, including in Windows itself. [5] UTF-16 is the only encoding (still) allowed on the web that is incompatible with 8-bit ASCII.
The XML format supports non-ASCII characters and storing NSValue objects (which, unlike GNUstep's ASCII property list format, Apple's ASCII property list format does not support). [10] Since XML files, however, are not the most space-efficient means of storage, Mac OS X 10.2 introduced a new format where property list files are stored as binary ...
Python 2 also distinguishes two types of strings: 8-bit ASCII ("bytes") strings (the default), explicitly indicated with a b or B prefix, and Unicode strings, indicated with a u or U prefix. [25] while in Python 3 strings are Unicode by default and bytes are a separate bytes type that when initialized with quotes must be prefixed with a b.