RFC 2279 (rfc2279) - Page 2 of 10

UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646

RFC 2279                         UTF-8                      January 1998


   present time, changes in Unicode and amendments to ISO/IEC 10646 have
   tracked each other, so that the character repertoires and code point
   assignments have remained in sync.  The relevant standardization
   committees have committed to maintain this very useful synchronism.

   The UCS-2 and UCS-4 encodings, however, are hard to use in many
   current applications and protocols that assume 8 or even 7 bit
   characters.  Even newer systems able to deal with 16 bit characters
   cannot process UCS-4 data. This situation has led to the development
   of so-called UCS transformation formats (UTF), each with different
   characteristics.

   UTF-1 has only historical interest, having been removed from ISO/IEC
   10646.  UTF-7 has the quality of encoding the full BMP repertoire
   using only octets with the high-order bit clear (7 bit US-ASCII
   values, [US-ASCII]), and is thus deemed a mail-safe encoding
   ([RFC 2152]).  UTF-8, the object of this memo, uses all bits of an
   octet, but has the quality of preserving the full US-ASCII range:
   US-ASCII characters are encoded in one octet having the normal US-
   ASCII value, and any octet with such a value can only stand for an
   US-ASCII character, and nothing else.

   UTF-16 is a scheme for transforming a subset of the UCS-4 repertoire
   into pairs of UCS-2 values from a reserved range.  UTF-16 impacts
   UTF-8 in that UCS-2 values from the reserved range must be treated
   specially in the UTF-8 transformation.

   UTF-8 encodes UCS-2 or UCS-4 characters as a varying number of
   octets, where the number of octets, and the value of each, depend on
   the integer value assigned to the character in ISO/IEC 10646.  This
   transformation format has the following characteristics (all values
   are in hexadecimal):

   -  Character values from 0000 0000 to 0000 007F (US-ASCII repertoire)
      correspond to octets 00 to 7F (7 bit US-ASCII values). A direct
      consequence is that a plain ASCII string is also a valid UTF-8
      string.

   -  US-ASCII values do not appear otherwise in a UTF-8 encoded
      character stream.  This provides compatibility with file systems
      or other software (e.g. the printf() function in C libraries) that
      parse based on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other
      values.

   -  Round-trip conversion is easy between UTF-8 and either of UCS-4,
      UCS-2.





Yergeau                     Standards Track