27 Sep
2007
27 Sep
'07
1:49 a.m.
On Sep 26, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Aaron Denney wrote:
UTF-16 has no advantage over UTF-8 in this respect, because of surrogate pairs and combining characters.
Good point.
Well, not so much. As Duncan mentioned, it's a matter of what the most common case is. UTF-16 is effectively fixed-width for the majority of text in the majority of languages. Combining sequences and surrogate pairs are relatively infrequent. Speaking as someone who has done a lot of Unicode implementation, I would say UTF-16 represents the best time/space tradeoff for an internal representation. As I mentioned, it's what's used in Windows, Mac OS X, ICU, and Java. Deborah