Character Encoding
ASCII
Advantages
Is the simplest way to encode the characters.
Doesn’t have endianness problems – uses 1 byte at a time original version uses only 7 bits – 128 different characters.
It takes up less storage space than unicode.
Disadvantages
Very limited capacity to represent non-English characters.
There are several extended versions – 8 bits (ISO 8859).
Unicode
Advantages
The latest version has more than 137 000 characters.
Covers 146 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets.
Disadvantages
There are several implementations:
UTF-8: compatible with ASCII, has variable length from 1 to 4 bytes and is used in *nix systems, www, HTML, etc.
UTF-16: has variable length from 2 to 4 bytes, is used in Windows, Mac OS, Java, .Net, KDE, etc.
UTF-32: fixed length of 4 bytes.
More complex processing.
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