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Re: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16

• To: "Xml-Dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
• From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>
• Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 22:44:25 +1100 (EST)
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <NBBBIBMKFOFCNEBAKDPLCEKIKDAA.xml-dev@b...>
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Paul Spencer said:
> I see many XML-based interoperability projects that specify whether to use
> UTF-8 or UTF-16 for Unicode character encoding. One will usually result in
> smaller documents/messages that the other (broadly, UTF-8 is better if the
> character set is mainly ASCII, and UTF-16 is better otherwise).

For Western XML documents, UTF-8 files will in every case be smaller than
UTF-16, even for non-Latin scripts.

For CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) XML documents, where three (or six)
bytes may be used by UTF-8 instead of UCS-16's two (or four), UTF-16 files
will usually be smaller.

But filesize is not the only factor. There is of course a small cost in
converting from the internal encoding used by software and the
transmission encoding. And compression adds cost but equalizes filesize.

Rick Jelliffe

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  • Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
    • From: "Paul Spencer" <xml-dev@b...>

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