Unicodeenkoodaus

Unicodeenkoodaus refers to the process of representing Unicode characters as sequences of bytes. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard designed to represent every character in virtually every writing system, as well as symbols and emojis. However, computers store and transmit data as bytes, which are groups of bits. Therefore, a method is needed to translate the abstract Unicode code points into concrete byte sequences.

Several different Unicode encoding forms exist, each with its own rules for converting code points into bytes. The most common ones are UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, meaning that characters can be represented by one to four bytes. This makes it very efficient for text that primarily uses ASCII characters, as these characters are represented by a single byte, just like in ASCII. UTF-8 is the dominant encoding on the internet.

UTF-16 is also a variable-width encoding, typically using two or four bytes per character. It is widely used in some operating systems and programming languages, particularly in East Asia. UTF-32 is a fixed-width encoding, where every character is represented by exactly four bytes. While this simplifies processing in some ways, it can be less efficient in terms of storage space for text with many characters that could be represented with fewer bytes. The choice of encoding can impact storage efficiency, processing speed, and compatibility between different systems and software.