From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2006-06-16T03:39:00+09:00 Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap? On 6/15/06, Juergen Strobel wrote: [ snip essentially accurate information ] > UTF-8 encodes every Unicode code point as a variable length sequence > of 1 to 4 (I think) bytes. It could be up to six bytes at one point. However, I think that there is still support for surrogate characters meaning that a single glyph *might* take as many as eight bytes to represent in the 1-4 byte representation. Even with that, though, those are rare and usually user-defined (private) ranges IIRC. This also doesn't deal with (de)composed glyphs/combining glyphs. > Currently Unicode requires 21 bit, but this has changed in the past. Yes. Unicode went from 16-bit (I think) to 32-bit to 21-bit. > Java got bitten by that by defining the character type to 16 bit and > hardcoding this in their VM, and now they need some kludges. Um. I think that the initial Java definition used UCS-2 (same as Windows did for NTFS and VFS) but now uses UTF-16, which has surrogate support (UCS-2 did not). -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin@halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin@zieglers.ca