Unicode UTF ASCII ANSI format differences

Question

What is the difference between the Unicode  UTF8  UTF7  UTF16  UTF32  ASCII  and ANSI encodings   In what way are these helpful for programmers

User · Answer

Some reading to get you started on character encodings: Joel on Software: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

By the way - ASP.NET has nothing to do with it. Encodings are universal.

User · Answer

Going down your list     Unicode  isn t an encoding  although unfortunately  a lot of documentation imprecisely uses it to refer to whichever Unicode encoding that particular system uses by default   On Windows and Java  this often means UTF-16  in many other places  it means UTF-8   Properly  Unicode refers to the abstract character set itself  not to any particular encoding  UTF-16  2 bytes per  code unit   This is the native format of strings in  NET  and generally in Windows and Java  Values outside the Basic Multilingual Plane  BMP  are encoded as surrogate pairs  These used to be relatively rarely used  but now many consumer applications will need to be aware of non-BMP characters in order to support emojis  UTF-8  Variable length encoding  1-4 bytes per code point  ASCII values are encoded as ASCII using 1 byte  UTF-7  Usually used for mail encoding  Chances are if you think you need it and you re not doing mail  you re wrong   That s just my experience of people posting in newsgroups etc - outside mail  it s really not widely used at all   UTF-32  Fixed width encoding using 4 bytes per code point  This isn t very efficient  but makes life easier outside the BMP  I have a  NET Utf32String class as part of my MiscUtil library  should you ever want it   It s not been very thoroughly tested  mind you   ASCII  Single byte encoding only using the bottom 7 bits   Unicode code points 0-127   No accents etc  ANSI  There s no one fixed ANSI encoding - there are lots of them  Usually when people say  ANSI  they mean  the default locale codepage for my system  which is obtained via Encoding Default  and is often Windows-1252 but can be other locales    There s more on my Unicode page and tips for debugging Unicode problems   The other big resource of code is unicode org which contains more information than you ll ever be able to work your way through - possibly the most useful bit is the code charts

[unicode] Unicode, UTF, ASCII, ANSI format differences

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