Programming Tutorials

What is UTF-8?

By: Markus Kuhn in Java Tutorials on 2008-08-13  

UCS and Unicode are first of all just code tables that assign integer numbers to characters. There exist several alternatives for how a sequence of such characters or their respective integer values can be represented as a sequence of bytes. The two most obvious encodings store Unicode text as sequences of either 2 or 4 bytes sequences. The official terms for these encodings are UCS-2 and UCS-4, respectively. Unless otherwise specified, the most significant byte comes first in these (Bigendian convention). An ASCII or Latin-1 file can be transformed into a UCS-2 file by simply inserting a 0x00 byte in front of every ASCII byte. If we want to have a UCS-4 file, we have to insert three 0x00 bytes instead before every ASCII byte.

Using UCS-2 (or UCS-4) under Unix would lead to very severe problems. Strings with these encodings can contain as parts of many wide characters bytes like "\0" or "/" which have a special meaning in filenames and other C library function parameters. In addition, the majority of UNIX tools expects ASCII files and cannot read 16-bit words as characters without major modifications. For these reasons, UCS-2 is not a suitable external encoding of Unicode in filenames, text files, environment variables, etc.

The UTF-8 encoding defined in ISO 10646-1:2000 and also described in RFC 3629 as well as section 3.9 of the Unicode 4.0 standard does not have these problems. It is clearly the way to go for using Unicode under Unix-style operating systems.

UTF-8 has the following properties:

• UCS characters U+0000 to U+007F (ASCII) are encoded simply as bytes 0x00 to 0x7F (ASCII compatibility). This means that files and strings which contain only 7-bit ASCII characters have the same encoding under both ASCII and UTF-8.
• All UCS characters >U+007F are encoded as a sequence of several bytes, each of which has the most significant bit set. Therefore, no ASCII byte (0x00-0x7F) can appear as part of any other character.
• The first byte of a multibyte sequence that represents a non-ASCII character is always in the range 0xC0 to 0xFD and it indicates how many bytes follow for this character. All further bytes in a multibyte sequence are in the range 0x80 to 0xBF. This allows easy resynchronization and makes the encoding stateless and robust against missing bytes.
• All possible 2³¹ UCS codes can be encoded.
• UTF-8 encoded characters may theoretically be up to six bytes long, however 16-bit BMP characters are only up to three bytes long.
• The sorting order of Bigendian UCS-4 byte strings is preserved.
• The bytes 0xFE and 0xFF are never used in the UTF-8 encoding.

The following byte sequences are used to represent a character. The sequence to be used depends on the Unicode number of the character: 

The xxx bit positions are filled with the bits of the character code number in binary representation. The rightmost x bit is the least-significant bit. Only the shortest possible multibyte sequence which can represent the code number of the character can be used. Note that in multibyte sequences, the number of leading 1 bits in the first byte is identical to the number of bytes in the entire sequence.

Examples: The Unicode character U+00A9 = 1010 1001 (copyright sign) is encoded in UTF-8 as

    11000010 10101001 = 0xC2 0xA9

and character U+2260 = 0010 0010 0110 0000 (not equal to) is encoded as:

    11100010 10001001 10100000 = 0xE2 0x89 0xA0

The official name and spelling of this encoding is UTF-8, where UTF stands for UCS Transformation Format. Please do not write UTF-8 in any documentation text in other ways (such as utf8 or UTF_8), unless of course you refer to a variable name and not the encoding itself.

An important note for developers of UTF-8 decoding routines: For security reasons, a UTF-8 decoder must not accept UTF-8 sequences that are longer than necessary to encode a character. For example, the character U+000A (line feed) must be accepted from a UTF-8 stream only in the form 0x0A, but not in any of the following five possible overlong forms:

  0xC0 0x8A
  0xE0 0x80 0x8A
  0xF0 0x80 0x80 0x8A
  0xF8 0x80 0x80 0x80 0x8A
  0xFC 0x80 0x80 0x80 0x80 0x8A

Any overlong UTF-8 sequence could be abused to bypass UTF-8 substring tests that look only for the shortest possible encoding. All overlong UTF-8 sequences start with one of the following byte patterns: 

Also note that the code positions U+D800 to U+DFFF (UTF-16 surrogates) as well as U+FFFE and U+FFFF must not occur in normal UTF-8 or UCS-4 data. UTF-8 decoders should treat them like malformed or overlong sequences for safety reasons.