Are the \x/\u/\U character references freely combinable with all string types? No. \x can be used in anything, but \u and \U can only be used in strings that are specifically UTF-encoded. However, for any UTF-encoded string, \u and \U can be used as you see fit. Are all the string types fixed-width, i.e. the … Read more
I am asking for the count of all the possible valid combinations in Unicode with explanation. 1,111,998: 17 planes × 65,536 characters per plane – 2048 surrogates – 66 noncharacters Note that UTF-8 and UTF-32 could theoretically encode much more than 17 planes, but the range is restricted based on the limitations of the UTF-16 … Read more
Excel Encodings I found the WINDOWS-1252 encoding to be the least frustrating when dealing with Excel. Since its basically Microsofts own proprietary character set, one can assume it will work on both the Mac and the Windows version of MS-Excel. Both versions at least include a corresponding “File origin” or “File encoding” selector which correctly … Read more
I believe there are a lot of good articles about this around the Web, but here is a short summary. Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable length encodings. However, in UTF-8 a character may occupy a minimum of 8 bits, while in UTF-16 character length starts with 16 bits. Main UTF-8 pros: Basic ASCII characters … Read more
Going down your list: “Unicode” isn’t an encoding, although unfortunately, a lot of documentation imprecisely uses it to refer to whichever Unicode encoding that particular system uses by default. On Windows and Java, this often means UTF-16; in many other places, it means UTF-8. Properly, Unicode refers to the abstract character set itself, not to … 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