UTF-8 explained

This is a short explanation of UTF-8—what it is, how it works, and why it’s popular.

Description

UTF-8 is a character encoding. First of all, you need to understand what a character is. The problem is, it’s hard to explain, so instead here are some examples: a5!Ω→김лÜ. A character encoding, then, is a method to represent characters so computers can understand them. If you consider the fact that computers only understand binary values, a character encoding basically specifies how to turn characters into 0s and 1s.

Traditionally in the Western computing world, a character is represented by a single byte, which in most systems is an octet (eight bits). For example, ASCII encodes the character A to the number 65, or 01000001 in 8-bit binary. It should be obvious why 8 bits (256 combinations) is not enough to encode all characters from all languages in the world.

UTF-8 is one of the most recent character encodings developed that supports all characters from the huge list known as Unicode. Unicode assigns a number called code point for each character that it recognises. The idea is similar to the A=65 mapping in ASCII. UTF-8 provides a way to represent these code points as bits, for the purpose of file storage or network transmission.

Technical details

If a character’s code point consists of 7 bits or less (i.e. code points 0-127), it is represented as one octet with the format 0xxxxxxx, where the x’s are the character code point in binary, padded with 0′s at the front if necessary to fill up the 7 bits.

For 8-11 bits, the representation is 2 octets of the form: 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx.

For 12-16 bits, 3 octets: 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx.

… And so on.

Note how the number of 1′s in the leading octet determines the number of octets the character occupies. Octets of the form 0xxxxxxx are reserved for the first 128 Unicode characters (7-bit code points), while octets of the form 10xxxxxx are continuations of preceding octet(s).

Popularity and support

Part of UTF-8′s popularity is due to its backwards compatibility with ASCII-based encodings, because the first 128 Unicode characters correspond with those of ASCII. For example, software that only supports ISO-8859-1 (a commonly used superset of ASCII) can still read a UTF-8 file containing only English characters. Even if the file contains a few non-English characters, the worst case is these characters will be replaced with multi-character gibberish, but the English characters will remain intact.

In terms of library support, each programming library generally chooses one encoding as its “native” encoding (e.g. UTF-8 in GLib and UTF-16 in modern Win32), but can usually convert between UTF-8 and UTF-16/UCS-2 at the minimum (GLib, Win32).

Further reading

Another great reading for anyone who wish to understand encodings is Joel Spolsky’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Unicode in Python 2

… is a pain.

One of the things I like about Python is that it normally makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot (monkey patching, anyone?). The only exception that is very frustrating for me is Python 2′s Unicode support, which is ugly and difficult to get right.

Really, at this point I don’t care much about other (planned) changes in Python 3. If Unicode support can be made as transparent as in Java or .NET, I would be really happy.