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Re: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16

• To: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@a...>
• Subject: Re: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:08:49 -0500
• Cc: Xml-Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <39325.203.51.20.11.1130759065.squirrel@i...>
• References: <NBBBIBMKFOFCNEBAKDPLCEKIKDAA.xml-dev@b...> <39325.203.51.20.11.1130759065.squirrel@i...>
• User-agent: Thunderbird 1.4 (Macintosh/20050908)

Rick Jelliffe wrote:

> 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.

First a correction: UTF-8 never uses six bytes for anything. The largest 
UTF-8 character you'll ever see is 4 bytes wide.

UTF-16 files may well be smaller, but it's not a sure thing. Even 
Chinese XML contains lots of ASCII characters such as <, >, &, =, ", and 
the space. Text heavy documents like novels and stories may well be 
smaller. Technical documents that also contain the digits 0-9 and other 
non-Chinese ASCII characters may even be larger in UTF-16. Either way, 
the size difference is not likely to be important. the reasons for 
choosing UTF-8 have little to do with size. See 
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-utf8/ for a slightly 
longer discussion of this issue.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

• References:
  • Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
    • From: "Paul Spencer" <xml-dev@b...>
  • Re: Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>

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