Unicode vs UTF8

[Antonio Linares]

Unicode uses TWO bytes per each character

UTF8 just uses TWO bytes for special characters only! (>127)

[Enrico Maria Giordano]

Unicode uses TWO bytes per each character

UTF8 just uses TWO bytes for special characters only! (>127)

Using an escape character? If yes, which character?

[nageswaragunupudi]

Utf8 encoding uses either 1 or 2 or 3 bytes for each character.
All latin characters upto asc 127 are represented by the same single character both in Ansi and Utf8 encodings.
Accented WU characters are encoded with 2 bytes.
Complex scripts like Asian languages use 3 bytes for each character.

utf8 also is one form of Unicode encodings.

Windows uses UTF16LE (Little Endian) encoding for all characters, i.e., 2 bytes for each character. This is what we call Wide Char.

Some sample characters:



Now, let us concatenate all UTF8 chars (6th column) and display:
9AÜĞత

Unicode system is a family of different encodings all of which are aimed at uniquely representing ever character of all languages in the world. Also the aim is to display these characters uniquely and exactly the sameway on all systems across the world despite different codepages. There are many such encoding systems out of which, UTF8 is ver popular.

We are mainly concernted with
(1) UTF8 because it is popular and used across the Web and also because many database servers support this encoding and
(2) UTF16LE because Windows OS internally deals with all strings in this format only.