Unicodemerkintätavat

Unicodemerkintätavat, known in English as Unicode representation methods, refer to the various ways Unicode characters can be encoded into a sequence of bytes. Unicode is a standard designed to represent all characters used in written languages. Since computers store information as bytes, a method is needed to translate these characters into binary data.

The most common Unicode encoding forms are UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding that uses one to four bytes per character. It is widely used on the internet and in many operating systems because it is backward compatible with ASCII, meaning that ASCII characters are represented by a single byte in UTF-8, just as they are in ASCII. This makes it efficient for text that primarily uses characters from the Latin alphabet.

UTF-16 is another variable-length encoding, using either two or four bytes per character. It is commonly used in environments like Windows and Java. While it can represent a wider range of characters than a fixed two-byte encoding, it can be less efficient than UTF-8 for ASCII-heavy text.

UTF-32 is a fixed-width encoding, using four bytes for every character. This simplifies character handling as each character occupies the same amount of space, but it can be very inefficient in terms of storage and bandwidth, especially for languages that use fewer than four bytes to represent their characters in other encodings. The choice of encoding can impact file size, processing speed, and compatibility between different systems and software.