UCS transformation format
UCS transformation format
(standard, character)One of a set of standard character encodings, the most widelyused of which are UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. The code tablesin ISO 10646 and in the Unicode standard are identical,although the Unicode standard includes additional material.
UTF-8 is the most widely used encoding, at least on Unixsystems. Since it does not include any bytes like '\\0' or '/'which have a special meaning in filenames and other Clibrary function parameters, and 7-bit ASCII characters havethe same encoding under both ASCII and UTF-8, the requiredchanges to existing software are minimised.
Other UTFs: UTF-1 and UTF-7 are not widely used.
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux.