Variable-width encoding: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:11, 30 May 2021

Revision as of 13:31, 2 August 2021

Line 8:

Early variable width encodings using less than a byte per character were sometimes used to pack English text into fewer bytes in [[adventure game]]s for early [[microcomputers]]. However [[disk storage|disks]] (which unlike tapes allowed random access allowing text to be loaded on demand), increases in computer memory and general purpose [[compression algorithm]]s have rendered such tricks largely obsolete.

Multibyte encodings are usually the result of a need to increase the number of characters which can be encoded without breaking [[backward compatibility]] with an existing constraint. For example, with one byte (8 bits) per character, one can encode 256 possible characters; in order to encode more than 256 characters, the obvious choice would be to use two or more bytes per encoding unit, two bytes (16 bits) would allow 65,536 possible characters, but such a change would break compatibility with existing systems and therefore might not be feasible at all.{{efn|As a real-life example of this, [[UTF-16]], which represents the most common characters in exactly the manner just described (and uses pairs of 16-bit code units for less-common characters) never gained traction as an encoding for text intended for interchange due to its incompatibility with the ubiquitous 7-/8-bit [[ASCII]] encoding, with its intended role instead being taken by [[UTF-8]], which ''does'' preserve ASCII compatibility.}}

==General structure==

Line 37:

{{Character encoding}}

==Notes==

{{notelist}}

==References==