UTF-16
Sign in to saveUTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding that supports all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode. The encoding is variable-length as code points are encoded with one or two code units. UTF-16 arose from an earlier obsolete fixed-width 16-bit encoding now known as UCS-2 (for 2-byte Universal Character Set), once it became clear that more than 216 (65,536) code points were needed, including most emoji and important CJK characters such as for personal and place names.
Key facts
- Character encoding.name
- UTF-16
- Character encoding.mime
- • text/plain;charset=UTF-16• text/plain; charset=utf-16le• text/plain; charset=utf-16be
- Character encoding.image
- UTF-16 encoding.svg
- Character encoding.caption
- Example of Unicode character encoding through UTF-16
- Character encoding.standard
- Unicode Standard
- Character encoding.classification
- Unicode Transformation Format, variable-width encoding
- Character encoding.lang
- International
- Character encoding.encodes
- ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode)
- Character encoding.extends
- UCS-2
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
18 sectionsContents
- History
- Description
- U+0000 to U+D7FF and U+E000 to U+FFFF
- Code points from U+010000 to U+10FFFF
- U+D800 to U+DFFF (surrogates)
- Examples
- Byte-order encoding schemes
- Efficiency
- Usage
- Operating systems
- File systems
- Messaging
- Programming languages
- Firmware
- See also
- Notes
- References
- External links
UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding that supports all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode. The encoding is variable-length as code points are encoded with one or two code units. UTF-16 arose from an earlier obsolete fixed-width 16-bit encoding now known as UCS-2 (for 2-byte Universal Character Set), once it became clear that more than 216 (65,536) code points were needed, including most emoji and important CJK characters such as for personal and place names.
UTF-16 is used by the Windows API, and by many programming environments such as Java and Qt. 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.