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RE: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16

• To: "Tech Rams" <techmailing@y...>,"Paul Spencer" <xml-dev@b...>,"Xml-Dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
• From: "Michael Rys" <mrys@m...>
• Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 20:27:04 -0700
• Thread-index: AcXb4C6WpUBqoPc+S8iLVwIVw59xOgAV/Aeg
• Thread-topic: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16

Actually some environments have better UTF-16 support than UTF-8
support. But you make a good point about what other components support
that you need to use. And you should make sure that you stay consistent.
So if you use a C# string that is a 2-byte char and pass the data to a
database in a 2-byte Unicode codepage then UTF-16 is probably better. If
you transport it through 1-byte characters in code pages that support
UTF-8 or byte streams, then UTF-8 is probably better.

Best regards
Michael

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tech Rams [mailto:techmailing@y...]
> Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 9:45 AM
> To: Paul Spencer; Xml-Dev
> Subject: Re:  Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
> 
> I believe that it is near impossible for parsers to
> support every character encoding, particularly given
> that you can have your own encoding scheme (if both
> parties understand it).
> 
> As you mentioned, UTF-8 has no limitations in
> expressability and is universally understood. Taking
> away the verbosity and processor requirements to parse
> documents which contain mostly 16-32 bit data, you
> have universal acceptance of your documents.
> 
> XML parsers are only one part of the picture. Apart
> from the markup, the actual data also needs to be
> processed by different applications. If you are using
> composite libraries/applications, your best bet is to
> deal with character encoding that is the most minimum
> common denominator that is supported by those
> libraries. And again, universal support for UTF-8
> comes handy there.
> 
> -rams
> 
> --- Paul Spencer <xml-dev@b...> wrote:
> 
> > 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). However, I
> > see no reason to specify this in terms of
> > interoperability since XML
> > processors must support both. Obviously, if you are
> > using encodings other
> > than these, they will need to be specified. Am I
> > being stupid here (after
> > all, it is Friday afternoon), or is there ever a
> > good reason to specify
> > which to use other than for document size reasons?
> >
> > Paul Spencer
> >
> >
> >
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