UnicodeEncodierungen

UnicodeEncodierungen, often shortened to encodings, are methods for representing Unicode characters as a sequence of bytes. Unicode itself is a standard that assigns a unique number, called a code point, to every character used in modern computing. However, computers store information as bytes, so these code points need to be translated into a byte representation.

Several Unicode encodings exist, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The most common is UTF-8. UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, meaning it uses a different number of bytes to represent different characters. ASCII characters, for example, are represented using a single byte, making UTF-8 backward compatible with ASCII. Other characters, such as those in many non-Latin scripts, require two, three, or even four bytes. This variable-width nature makes UTF-8 efficient for text that contains many ASCII characters, such as English, while still being able to represent the full spectrum of Unicode characters.

Another widely used encoding is UTF-16. UTF-16 is also a variable-width encoding, typically using two bytes for most common characters and four bytes for less common ones. While UTF-16 can be more compact than UTF-8 for East Asian languages, it is not backward compatible with ASCII. If the first byte of a UTF-16 sequence is zero, it might be misinterpreted as an ASCII character.

UTF-32 is a fixed-width encoding, meaning every Unicode character is represented using exactly four bytes. This simplifies processing as all characters have the same size, but it can be less space-efficient, especially for text that primarily uses characters from the Basic Multilingual Plane, which are commonly found in ASCII and Western European languages. The choice of encoding can significantly impact file size and processing speed, and interoperability issues can arise if different systems use incompatible encodings.