UTF-8(7)                                                     Linux Programmer's Manual                                                    UTF-8(7)

NAME

       UTF-8 - an ASCII compatible multibyte Unicode encoding

DESCRIPTION

       The  Unicode  3.0 character set occupies a 16-bit code space.  The most obvious Unicode encoding (known as UCS-2) consists of a sequence of
       16-bit words.  Such strings can contain--as part of many 16-bit characters--bytes such as '' or '/', which  have  a  special  meaning  in
       filenames  and  other C library function arguments.  In addition, the majority of UNIX tools expect ASCII files and can't 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, and so on.  The ISO 10646 Universal Character Set (UCS), a superset of Unicode, occupies an even larger code
       space--31 bits--and the obvious UCS-4 encoding for it (a sequence of 32-bit words) has the same problems.

       The UTF-8 encoding of Unicode and UCS does not have these problems and is the common way in which Unicode is used on  UNIX-style  operating
       systems.

   Properties
       The UTF-8 encoding has the following nice properties:

       * UCS characters 0x00000000 to 0x0000007f (the classic US-ASCII characters) 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 greater than 0x7f are encoded as a multibyte sequence consisting only of bytes in the range 0x80 to 0xfd, so no  ASCII
         byte can appear as part of another character and there are no problems with, for example,  '' or '/'.

       * The lexicographic sorting order of UCS-4 strings is preserved.

       * All possible 2^31 UCS codes can be encoded using UTF-8.

       * The bytes 0xc0, 0xc1, 0xfe, and 0xff are never used in the UTF-8 encoding.

       * The  first  byte  of a multibyte sequence which represents a single non-ASCII UCS character is always in the range 0xc2 to 0xfd and indi-
         cates how long this multibyte sequence is.  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.

       * UTF-8 encoded UCS characters may be up to six bytes long, however the Unicode standard specifies no characters above 0x10ffff, so Unicode
         characters can be only up to four bytes long in UTF-8.

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

       0x00000000 - 0x0000007F:
           0xxxxxxx

       0x00000080 - 0x000007FF:
           110xxxxx 10xxxxxx

       0x00000800 - 0x0000FFFF:
           1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

       0x00010000 - 0x001FFFFF:
           11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

       0x00200000 - 0x03FFFFFF:
           111110xx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

       0x04000000 - 0x7FFFFFFF:
           1111110x 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

       The xxx bit positions are filled with the bits of the character code number in binary representation,  most  significant  bit  first  (big-
       endian).  Only the shortest possible multibyte sequence which can represent the code number of the character can be used.

       The  UCS  code  values  0xd800-0xdfff  (UTF-16 surrogates) as well as 0xfffe and 0xffff (UCS noncharacters) should not appear in conforming
       UTF-8 streams. According to RFC 3629 no point above U+10FFFF should be used, which limits characters to four bytes.

   Example
       The Unicode character 0xa9 = 1010 1001 (the copyright sign) is encoded in UTF-8 as

              11000010 10101001 = 0xc2 0xa9

       and character 0x2260 = 0010 0010 0110 0000 (the "not equal" symbol) is encoded as:

              11100010 10001001 10100000 = 0xe2 0x89 0xa0

   Application notes
       Users have to select a UTF-8 locale, for example with

              export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

       in order to activate the UTF-8 support in applications.

       Application software that has to be aware of the used character encoding should always set the locale with for example

              setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")

       and programmers can then test the expression

              strcmp(nl_langinfo(CODESET), "UTF-8") == 0

       to determine whether a UTF-8 locale has been selected and whether therefore all plaintext standard input and  output,  terminal  communica-
       tion, plaintext file content, filenames and environment variables are encoded in UTF-8.

       Programmers  accustomed  to  single-byte  encodings  such  as US-ASCII or ISO 8859 have to be aware that two assumptions made so far are no
       longer valid in UTF-8 locales.  Firstly, a single byte does not necessarily correspond any more to a  single  character.   Secondly,  since
       modern  terminal emulators in UTF-8 mode also support Chinese, Japanese, and Korean double-width characters as well as nonspacing combining
       characters, outputting a single character does not necessarily advance the cursor by one position as it did in  ASCII.   Library  functions
       such as mbsrtowcs(3) and wcswidth(3) should be used today to count characters and cursor positions.

       The  official  ESC  sequence  to  switch  from  an  ISO  2022 encoding scheme (as used for instance by VT100 terminals) to UTF-8 is ESC % G
       ("x1b%G").  The corresponding return sequence from UTF-8 to ISO 2022 is ESC % @ ("x1b%@").  Other ISO 2022 sequences (such as for switch-
       ing the G0 and G1 sets) are not applicable in UTF-8 mode.

   Security
       The  Unicode  and  UCS  standards  require  that producers of UTF-8 shall use the shortest form possible, for example, producing a two-byte
       sequence with first byte 0xc0 is nonconforming.  Unicode 3.1 has added the requirement that conforming programs must not accept  non-short-
       est  forms  in their input.  This is for security reasons: if user input is checked for possible security violations, a program might check
       only for the ASCII version of "/../" or ";" or NUL and overlook that there are many non-ASCII ways to represent  these  things  in  a  non-
       shortest UTF-8 encoding.

   Standards
       ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000, Unicode 3.1, RFC 3629, Plan 9.

SEE ALSO

       locale(1), nl_langinfo(3), setlocale(3), charsets(7), unicode(7)

COLOPHON

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       latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

GNU                                                                 2016-07-17                                                            UTF-8(7)