Unicode in Microsoft Windows: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:11, 20 July 2024

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{{Short description|Overview on Unicode implementation in Microsoft Windows}}

{{more citations needed|date=June 2011}}

[[Microsoft]] was one of the first companies to implement [[Unicode]] in their products. [[Windows NT]] was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in [[system call]]s. Using the (now obsolete) [[UCS-2]] encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to the [[variable-width encoding]] [[UTF-16]] starting with [[Windows 2000]], allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs. However Microsoft did not support [[UTF-8]] in its API until May 2019; meaning all currently supported Windows versions do (except some older LTSC Windows 10 Enterprise editions, already out of [[mainstream support]]).

Before 2019, Microsoft emphasized UTF-16 (i.e. -W API), but has since recommended to use [[UTF-8]] (at least in some cases),<ref name="Microsoft-UTF-8" /> on Windows and [[Xbox]] (and in other of its products), even states "UTF-8 is the universal code page for internationalization [and] UTF-16 [... is] a unique burden that Windows places on code that targets multiple platforms. [..] Windows [is] moving forward to support UTF-8 to remove this unique burden [resulting] in fewer internationalization issues in apps and games".<ref name="Microsoft GDK" />