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Utf-8 vs Utf-16

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Utf-8 and utf-16 are character encodings that each handle the 128,237 characters of Unicode that cover 135 modern and historical languages. Unicode is a standard and utf-8 and utf-16 are implementations of the standard. While Unicode is currently 128,237 characters it can handle up to 1,114,112 characters. This allows unicode to grow with time as new symbols in areas such as science arise.

The Difference

Utf-8 and utf-16 both handle the same Unicode characters. They are both variable length encodings that require up to 32 bits per character. The difference is that Utf-8 encodes the common characters including English and numbers using 8-bits. Utf-16 uses at least 16-bits for every character.

Details

Utf-8 encodes characters as 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit. It does this in the order of unicode that places Latin characters first. As such, common characters such as space, A or 0 are 8-bit.
Utf-16 encodes characters as 16-bit or 32-bit. It also does this in the order of unicode such that most common characters end up as 16-bit encodings.
Utf-8 almost always results in smaller data and tends to be more popular.
Utf-8 vs Utf-16
Utf-8
Utf-16
Definition
A variable length character encoding for Unicode that uses a 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit encoding depending on the character.
A variable length character encoding for Unicode that uses a 16-bit or 32-bit encoding depending on the character.

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