When do you need unicode

If you see FFFE, the data came from another type of machine, and needs to be converted to your architecture. This involves swapping every byte in the file. But unfortunately, things are not that simple. The BOM is actually a valid Unicode character — what if someone sent a file without a header, and that character was actually part of the file?

This is an open issue in Unicode. This opens up design observation 2: Multi-byte data will have byte order issues! ASCII never had to worry about byte order — each character was a single byte, and could not be misinterpreted. Aside: UCS-2 stores data in a flat bit chunk. UTF allows up to 20 bits split between 2 bit characters, known as a surrogate pair. Each character in the surrogate pair is an invalid unicode character by itself, but together a valid one can be extracted.

Design observation 3: Consider backwards compatibility. How will an old program read new data? Ignoring new data is good. Breaking on new data is bad. Enter UTF It is the default encoding for XML. These bytes start with A 2-byte example looks like this. This means there are 2 bytes in the sequence. In any case, UTF-8 still needs a header to indicate how the text was encoded. Feel free to use charmap to copy in some Unicode characters and see how they are stored in UTF Or, you can experiment online.

So how do we send Unicode data through them? UTF-7 works like this. If it follows a character, that item is interpreted literally. UTF is pretty clever, eh? Unicode is an interesting study. It opened my eyes to design tradeoffs, and the importance of separating the core idea from the encoding used to save it. Learn Right, Not Rote. Home Articles Popular Calculus.

Feedback Contact About Newsletter. Let it rustle around in your mind… Got it? This brings us to our first design decision: compatibility. But the question remained: How do we store a codepoint as data?

Encoding to the Rescue From above, encoding turns an idea into raw data. Information Builders has created a code page of UTF-8 values for all supported scripts. Unicode supports data with multiple scripts such as French, Japanese, and Hebrew. It enables you to combine records from different scripts on a single report.

Before Unicode, a computer could only process and display the written symbols on its operating system code page, which was tied to a single script. For example, if a computer could process French, it could not process Japanese and Hebrew. There is a growing trend for all new computer technologies to use Unicode for text data. Unicode is a preferred text encoding method in browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.

Unicode enables Information Builders products to seamlessly handle the interface with third-party facilities that use Unicode and are integrated into Information Builders product line. Configure your system for Unicode if you need to display text in unrelated scripts.

There may be situations in which Unicode appears to be the only way to assimilate scripts, because you need to include third-party Unicode data. However, in many cases, Unicode is not the only solution. For example, if you have Oracle data with a UTF-8 Unicode data type, but all the text is in Japanese and English, you do not need a full Unicode implementation.

Japanese and English are not unrelated scripts. Unicode is necessary only when combining text in unrelated scripts, such as Japanese, French, and Hebrew. In this situation, you would configure your entire system for UTF-8 Unicode. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Another factor is that even if one managed to store a recognizable version of every glyph in only 32 bytes each 16x16 dot matrix , the space required to hold a font with , characters might for many applications be orders of magnitude larger than the space required for everything else combined.

I interpreted your main point as describing the difficulty of converting a sequence of bytes to a code point. My point was that even if one can decipher a sequence of code points, that's rather pointless unless one invests in a huge font.

I think we agree, it is just a matter of wording. Robert Harvey Robert Harvey k 54 54 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Certain encodings of Unicode i. Other encodings i. UTF-8 do not have that penalty though at the cost of using more storage for other characters like those of the Chinese and Japanese languages. JustinCave: fixed. I'm not sure that I follow. So you can use UTF-8 with no penalty of any kind in that case.

I think the point is that Unicode may take more space than an 8 bit encoding using a code page. Without more information on what characters are being encoded, we cannot say how much more space would be required, even if that value is zero bytes. These days, I think "larger systems" would include everything from smart phones on up.

I suspect you could use language statistics to determine rough extra memory required per language for UTF-8, but I don't know if anyone's done it. For western languages, it will be small because only a minority of characters are accented. Show 8 more comments.

In these situations Unicode conversion is almost always a waste of time. Zan Lynx Zan Lynx 1, 11 11 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges. Isn't Unicode supported in URLs? I'm deciding whether or not to make use of this.

Dogweather: I do most of my work on back-end stuff. So my answer is that no, URLs don't use Unicode at all. HTTP uses bytes. Just bytes. Make them whatever you want. Don't assume they are Unicode although they probably are.