I mentioned UCS-2 because it, like UTF-16, is a mess. Except that it’s worse. Anyway, it wasn’t a mistake to mention them together, and I never even vaguely implied that both were or were not fixed width. I said people who jumped on either of those have paid for doing so, because both are problematic. Plus of course UCS-2 doesn't encode most of Unicode.

As for the many many advantages of UTF-8 over UTF-16, I can hardly begin to list them all. Sorts right numerically. Not dependent on endianness. Compat with ASCII. Smaller. Works with the C syscall interface without retooling. Never uses NULL bytes unless it means them to be NULL bytes. Never lets lazy programmers trick themselves into thinking it is fixed width. Is that enough for you?

The Wikipedia page has a lot of them.

In reply to Re^5: Best Way to Get Length of UTF-8 String in Bytes? by tchrist
in thread Best Way to Get Length of UTF-8 String in Bytes? by Jim

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