Vlastnosti

Kódování UTF-8 má několik pěkných vlastností:

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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.

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Všechny znaky UCS větší než 0x7f jsou kódovány jako sekvence bytů v rozmezí od 0x80 do 0xfd, takže se zde neobjeví žádný znak ASCII ani nevznikají problémy se znaky jako '\0' nebo '/'.

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Lexikografické uspořádání znaků z UCS-4 se zachovává.

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Libovolnou z 2^31 kombinací UCS lze zakódovat pomocí UTF-8.

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Kódy 0xc0, 0xc1, 0xfe a 0xff nejsou použity v kódování UTF-8.

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První byte vícebytové sekvence reprezentující jeden ne-ASCII znak UCS je vždy v intervalu 0xc0 až 0xfd a indikuje, jak dlouhá je sekvence bytů. Všechny následující byty jsou v rozmezí 0x80 až 0xbf. Toto umožňuje jednoduchou resynchronizaci při výpadku bytu(ů), protože se jedná o bezstavové kódování.

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UTF-8 kóduje znaky UCS až do šestibytových sekvencí, nicméně standard Unicode nespecifikuje znaky nad 0x10ffff, takže Unicode znaky mohou být v UTF-8 dlouhé nejvýše čtyři byty.

Kódování

Následující sekvence jsou použity pro reprezentování znaků. Typ použité sekvence závisí na kódu UCS daného znaku:

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.

PŘÍKLAD

Znak Unicode 0xa9 = 1010 1001 (copyright) je kódován v UTF-8 jako:

a znak 0x2260 = 0010 0010 0110 0000 (není rovno) je kódován jako:

Praktické poznámky

Uživatelé musejí vybrat UTF-8 locale, např. pomocí

aby aktivovali podporu UTF-8 v aplikacích.

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

and programmers can then test the expression

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

Programmers accustomed to single-byte encodings such as US-ASCII or ISO/IEC 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/IEC 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/IEC 2022 is ESC % @ ("\x1b%@"). Other ISO/IEC 2022 sequences (such as for switching 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-shortest 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.

STANDARDY

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