How is UTF-8 stored?
When software reading UTF-8 comes across a byte starting with 1, it counts how many 1’s follow before encountering a 0. So a byte of the form 110xxxxx says the first five bits of a Unicode character are stored at the end of this byte, and the rest of the bits are coming in the next byte.
What is UTF-8 system text encoding?
This property returns a UTF8Encoding object that encodes Unicode (UTF-16-encoded) characters into a sequence of one to four bytes per character, and that decodes a UTF-8-encoded byte array to Unicode (UTF-16-encoded) characters.
What does UTF-8 mean in plain text?
UTF-8 is a mean to encode any Unicode characters in the middle of a “traditional” ASCII (plain text) file. ASCII files needs only one byte per character.
What does it mean when UTF-8 code greater than 127?
Codes greater than 127 are encoded into several bytes. On the other hand, if our byte is negative, this means that it’s probably an UTF-8 encoded character whose code is greater than 127. This also means that it should be followed by at least one more negative byte. UTF-8 is designed to encode any Unicode character using less space as possible.
Is it possible to write Chinese characters in UTF-8?
However, you may need to write a Chinese character or a mathematical formula in the middle of your text, and UTF-8 makes it possible : When the code of an Unicode character does not fit in a single byte, it is encoded into 2, 3 or 4 bytes. This encoding tries not to break the old and traditional ASCII encoding.
How to store Unicode compatible text in a computer?
So, seems the most universal way to store Unicode compatible text in computer files would be to use 4 bytes per character. However, old ASCII text files would become unreadable (as they use only 1 byte per character). And converting them to 4 bytes per characters would waste a lot of space (four time more space)