UTF16merkintöjen

UTF16merkintöjen, or UTF-16 encoding notation, refers to a system for representing characters from the Unicode standard using a variable-length encoding scheme where characters are encoded using either one or two 16-bit units. This means a single character might take up 16 bits (2 bytes) or 32 bits (4 bytes) of storage. The primary goal of UTF-16 is to accommodate the vast number of characters in Unicode, especially those outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).

Characters within the BMP, which includes most commonly used characters from the world's writing systems, are represented by a single 16-bit unit. Characters outside the BMP, such as many rare or historical scripts, are represented using a surrogate pair, which consists of two 16-bit units. This two-unit representation allows UTF-16 to cover the full range of Unicode code points, which extend beyond the 65,536 characters representable by a single 16-bit unit.

UTF-16 is commonly used in certain operating systems and programming environments, notably Microsoft Windows and Java. Its advantage lies in its ability to represent all Unicode characters efficiently, especially for languages that predominantly use characters within the BMP. However, the variable length can introduce complexity in string processing compared to fixed-width encodings like UTF-32, and it can be less space-efficient than UTF-8 for predominantly ASCII text. Byte order can also be a concern with UTF-16, leading to the use of Byte Order Marks (BOMs) to indicate whether the encoding is big-endian or little-endian.