Markus Scherer scripsit: > UTF-8 is useful because it's simple, and supported just about everywhere - > but it's otherwise hardly optimal for anything.
You entirely omit its principal advantage, sine qua non: it's maximally ASCII-compatible, using bytes 0x00 to 0x7F to represent ASCII characters and nothing else. Mark Crispin's UTF-9 (not to be confused with Jerome Abela's) is also excellent, although most of us don't have 36-bit systems, for which it makes sense. A precis: Code points (base 2) UTF-9 code units (base 2) 0000000000000abcdefgh 0abcdefgh 00000abcdefghijklmnop 1abcdefgh 0ijklmnop abcdefghijklmnopqrstu 1000abcde 1fghijklm 0nopqrstu This is almost as good as Latin-1 for its repertoire, only minutely worse than UTF-16 for the rest of the BMP, and beats all other encodings for the other planes. -- John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan http://www.reutershealth.com Charles li reis, nostre emperesdre magnes, Set anz totz pleinz ad ested in Espagnes.
