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What's the point of UTF-16?

Asked 2011-03-13T20:28:00.323
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I've never understood the point of UTF-16 encoding. If you need to be able to treat strings as random access (i.e. a code point is the same as a code unit) then you need UTF-32, since UTF-16 is still variable length. If you don't need this, then UTF-16 seems like a colossal waste of space compared to UTF-8. What are the advantages of UTF-16 over UTF-8 and UTF-32 and why do Windows and Java use it as their native encoding?

utf-8 character-encoding utf-16 utf utf-32
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UTF16 is generally used as a direct mapping to multi-byte character sets, ie onyl the original 0-0xFFFF assigned characters.

This gives you the best of both worlds, you have fixed character size but can still print all the characters anyone is likely to use (orthodox Klingon religous scripts excepted)

answered 2011-03-13T20:32:40.323

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