This article compares [[Unicode]] encodings. Two situations are considered: [[8-bit-clean]] environments (which can be assumed), and environments that forbid use of [[byte]] values that have the high bit set. Originally such prohibitions were to allow for links that used only seven data bits, but they remain in some standards and so some standard-conforming software must generate messages that comply with the restrictions. [[Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode]] and [[Binary Ordered Compression for Unicode]] are excluded from the comparison tables because it is difficult to simply quantify their size.
