RFC 2279 (rfc2279) - Page 1 of 10
UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group F. Yergeau
Request for Comments: 2279 Alis Technologies
Obsoletes: 2044 January 1998
Category: Standards Track
UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
ISO/IEC 10646-1 defines a multi-octet character set called the
Universal Character Set (UCS) which encompasses most of the world's
writing systems. Multi-octet characters, however, are not compatible
with many current applications and protocols, and this has led to the
development of a few so-called UCS transformation formats (UTF), each
with different characteristics. UTF-8, the object of this memo, has
the characteristic of preserving the full US-ASCII range, providing
compatibility with file systems, parsers and other software that rely
on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other values. This memo
updates and replaces RFC 2044, in particular addressing the question
of versions of the relevant standards.
1. Introduction
ISO/IEC 10646-1 [ISO-10646] defines a multi-octet character set
called the Universal Character Set (UCS), which encompasses most of
the world's writing systems. Two multi-octet encodings are defined,
a four-octet per character encoding called UCS-4 and a two-octet per
character encoding called UCS-2, able to address only the first 64K
characters of the UCS (the Basic Multilingual Plane, BMP), outside of
which there are currently no assignments.
It is noteworthy that the same set of characters is defined by the
Unicode standard [UNICODE], which further defines additional
character properties and other application details of great interest
to implementors, but does not have the UCS-4 encoding. Up to the
Yergeau Standards Track