UTF16enkoodaukseen

UTF-16 encoding is a character encoding standard used to represent text in computing. It is part of the Unicode Standard and is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode. UTF-16 uses one or two 16-bit code units to represent each character. Characters with code points in the range U+0000 to U+FFFF are represented by a single 16-bit code unit, while characters with code points above U+10000 are represented by a pair of 16-bit code units, known as a surrogate pair.

UTF-16 encoding is widely used in modern computing systems, particularly in environments where memory usage is a concern. It is the standard encoding for the Windows operating system and is also used in Java programming language. UTF-16 is designed to be efficient in terms of both storage and processing, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

The UTF-16 encoding scheme includes several variants, such as UTF-16LE (Little Endian) and UTF-16BE (Big Endian), which differ in the byte order of the 16-bit code units. UTF-16 also includes a byte order mark (BOM) to indicate the byte order of the encoded text.

UTF-16 encoding is a variable-width encoding, meaning that the number of bytes used to represent a character can vary. This can make it more complex to process than fixed-width encodings, but it allows for more efficient use of storage space. UTF-16 is designed to be backward compatible with the earlier UCS-2 encoding, which used a fixed-width 16-bit encoding for characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). However, UTF-16 can represent characters outside the BMP, making it more versatile than UCS-2.