MySQL’s utf32 and utf8mb4 (as well as standard UTF-8) can directly store any character specified by Unicode; the former is fixed size at 4 bytes per character whereas the latter is between 1 and 4 bytes per character. utf8mb3 and the original utf8 can only store the first 65,536 codepoints, which will cover CJVK (Chinese, … Read more
When Windows NT was designed UTF-16 didn’t exist (NT 3.51 was born in 1993, while UTF-16 was born in 1996 with the Unicode 2.0 standard); there was instead UCS-2, which, at that time, was enough to hold every character available in Unicode, so the 1 code point = 1 code unit equivalence was actually true … Read more
UTF-8 has an advantage in the case where ASCII characters represent the majority of characters in a block of text, because UTF-8 encodes these into 8 bits (like ASCII). It is also advantageous in that a UTF-8 file containing only ASCII characters has the same encoding as an ASCII file. UTF-16 is better where ASCII … Read more