Comparison of Unicode encodings: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:45, 27 July 2024

Revision as of 21:05, 27 July 2024

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===Processing time===

Text with variable-length encoding such as UTF-8 or UTF-16 is harder to process if there is a need to work with individual code units as opposed to working with sequences of code unitspoints. Searching is unaffected by whether the characters are variably sized since a search for a sequence of code units does not care about the divisions. Howver, it does require that the encoding be [[self-synchronizing code|self-synchronizing]], which both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are. A common misconception is that there is a need to "find the ''n''th character" and that this requires a fixed-length encoding; however, in real use the number ''n'' is only derived from examining the {{nowrap|''n−1''}} characters, thus sequential access is needed anyway.{{Citation needed|date=October 2013}}

Efficiently using character sequences in one [[endianness|endian order]] loaded onto a machine with a different endian order requires extra processing. Characters may either be converted before use or processed with two distinct systems. Byte-based encodings such as UTF-8 do not have this problem.{{why|date=July 2024}} [[UTF-16BE]] and [[UTF-32BE]] are [[endianness|big-endian]], [[UTF-16LE]] and [[UTF-32LE]] are [[endianness|little-endian]].