UCS2LE

UCS2LE refers to a character encoding scheme. It is a form of Unicode, specifically a 16-bit encoding where the bytes are arranged in little-endian order. Unicode is a standard that assigns a unique number, called a code point, to every character. UCS-2 represents characters using 16 bits, which allows for the encoding of a large number of characters.

The "LE" in UCS2LE signifies "little-endian." In computer systems, endianness refers to the order in which bytes are stored in memory. Little-endian systems store the least significant byte first. Therefore, in UCS2LE, a 16-bit character will have its lower-order byte stored at a lower memory address than its higher-order byte. This is in contrast to big-endian systems, which store the most significant byte first.

UCS-2, and by extension UCS2LE, is largely superseded by UTF-16. UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding that can represent all Unicode code points, whereas UCS-2 is limited to characters within the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). While UCS-2 is a fixed-width 16-bit encoding, UTF-16 can use one or two 16-bit units to represent characters. However, UCS2LE was historically used in some systems, particularly older versions of Windows, for internal string representation. Understanding its byte order is crucial for proper data processing and interoperability when dealing with systems or files that may still employ this encoding.