Unicode, Unicode Big Endian or UTF-8? What is the difference? Which format is better

notepadunicodeutf-8

When I try to save a text file with non-English text in Notepad, I get an option to choose between Unicode, Unicode Big Endian and UTF-8. What is the difference between these formats?

Assuming I do not want any backward compatibility (with older OS versions or apps) and I do not care about the file size, which of these formats is better?

(Assume that the text can be in languages like Chinese or Japanese, in addition to other languages.)

Note: From the answers and comments below it seems that in Notepad lingo, Unicode is UTF-16 (Little Endian), Unicode Big Endian is UTF-16 (Big Endian) and UTF-8 is well UTF-8.

Best Answer

Dunno. Which is better: a saw or a hammer? :-)

Unicode isn't UTF

There's a bit in the article that's a bit more relevant to the subject at hand though:

  • UTF-8 focuses on minimizing the byte size for representation of characters from the ASCII set (variable length representation: each character is represented on 1 to 4 bytes, and ASCII characters all fit on 1 byte). As Joel puts it:

“Look at all those zeros!” they said, since they were Americans and they were looking at English text which rarely used code points above U+00FF. Also they were liberal hippies in California who wanted to conserve (sneer). If they were Texans they wouldn’t have minded guzzling twice the number of bytes. But those Californian wimps couldn’t bear the idea of doubling the amount of storage it took for strings

  • UTF-32 focuses on exhaustiveness and fixed-length representation, using 4 bytes for all characters. It’s the most straightforward translation, mapping directly the Unicode code-point to 4 bytes. Obviously, it’s not very size-efficient.

  • UTF-16 is a compromise, using 2 bytes most of the time, but expanding to 2 * 2 bytes per character to represent certain characters, those not included in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).

Also see The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Related Question