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A UTF-16 "subset" of Unicode doesn't exist. all UTF-* encodings are just that: encodings. They can all represent the entire Unicode character set. (Except for U
by tremon 5y ago
A UTF-16 "subset" of Unicode doesn't exist. all UTF-* encodings are just that: encodings. They can all represent the entire Unicode character set. (Except for UTF-7, which never was an official standard).
What you're referring to is UCS-2 [0], which is UTF-16 without support for the high surrogates that make up the rest of the Unicode character set. But to imply that UTF-16 is a subset of Unicode is just not true.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCS-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCS-2
- Dylan16807 5y agoThat they can all represent all of unicode is true, but they're not "just" encodings either. The current code space of unicode is built around UTF-16. That's why there are 17 planes.
- chrismorgan 5y agoAnd why surrogates are a thing, and why code points and scalar values are different concepts. I hate UTF-16. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to Unicode. It ruined Unicode.
- est 5y agoCode points, scalar values, glype, surrogates, encodings Unicode should be called multicode really. If we want something "uni-" then all of them should better be unified to one encoding. Hopefully UTF-8 do the job.