UTF-16 Character Encoding - What You Need to Know

In the early days of computing, character encoding was a challenge for software developers who needed to build separate versions of their applications for each language they wanted to support. This led to the development of single and double byte character encodings that supported various languages. However, this approach was not feasible as it required individual language codes that needed testing, updating, maintenance, and support.

To overcome this challenge, the world turned to ASCII, which used binary values of zeros and ones, with each character encoded in 7 bits. However, ASCII had its limitations, as it could not represent extended characters, accents, and non-English alphabets found in languages such as European, Korean, Chinese, or Japanese.

To address this issue, ISO Latin was developed, which was represented as ISO-8859-1 for UNIX and Windows-1252 for Windows. This single-byte character set supported major European languages such as French, Spanish, and German, as well as multiple languages from around the world. However, many Eastern European and Baltic languages still needed a different encoding character set referred to as ISO Latin 2.

Enter Unicode, which is a character encoding standard that supports encoding for many languages worldwide. Unicode enabled companies with truly global ambitions to reach their customers. Whether you are thinking of marketing to China, Japan, Korea, or writing in Arabic, Hebrew, or even Turkish languages, Unicode has got you covered with either the single character-based UTF-8 or double character-based UTF-16.

UTF-8 is a single-byte character encoding standard that uses 8-bit blocks to represent a character on the internet. It is by far the most commonly used character encoder of languages, accounting for 86.7% of all web pages. The major advantage of using UTF-8 character encoding is that all ASCII characters will remain as single-byte charset, which enables the web content developer to keep the underlying HTML markup in single-byte ASCII and save data space.

UTF-16, on the other hand, is another widely accepted encoding standard that uses 16-bit character code points. It works just like UTF-8, but assigns double-bytes for each character that needs to be coded, instead of single-bytes that UTF-8 uses. This makes it a better option for languages that require more than 16 bits to represent a character.

At UTF-8.de, we offer an online converter program that can transform your website's character encoding to either UTF-16 or UTF-8, depending on your needs. Join the global community of companies with truly global ambitions and improve your website's performance and global accessibility by transforming its character encoding today.