1UTF-8(7) Linux Programmer's Manual UTF-8(7)
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6 UTF-8 - an ASCII compatible multibyte Unicode encoding
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9 The Unicode 3.0 character set occupies a 16-bit code space. The most
10 obvious Unicode encoding (known as UCS-2) consists of a sequence of
11 16-bit words. Such strings can contain as parts of many 16-bit charac‐
12 ters bytes like '\0' or '/' which have a special meaning in filenames
13 and other C library function arguments. In addition, the majority of
14 Unix tools expects ASCII files and can't read 16-bit words as charac‐
15 ters without major modifications. For these reasons, UCS-2 is not a
16 suitable external encoding of Unicode in filenames, text files, envi‐
17 ronment variables, etc. The ISO 10646 Universal Character Set (UCS), a
18 superset of Unicode, occupies even a 31-bit code space and the obvious
19 UCS-4 encoding for it (a sequence of 32-bit words) has the same prob‐
20 lems.
21 The UTF-8 encoding of Unicode and UCS does not have these problems and
23 is the common way in which Unicode is used on Unix-style operating sys‐
24 tems.
25 Properties
27 The UTF-8 encoding has the following nice properties:
28 * UCS characters 0x00000000 to 0x0000007f (the classic US-ASCII charac‐
30 ters) are encoded simply as bytes 0x00 to 0x7f (ASCII compatibility).
31 This means that files and strings which contain only 7-bit ASCII
32 characters have the same encoding under both ASCII and UTF-8.
33 * All UCS characters greater than 0x7f are encoded as a multibyte
35 sequence consisting only of bytes in the range 0x80 to 0xfd, so no
36 ASCII byte can appear as part of another character and there are no
37 problems with, for example, '\0' or '/'.
38 * The lexicographic sorting order of UCS-4 strings is preserved.
40 * All possible 2^31 UCS codes can be encoded using UTF-8.
42 * The bytes 0xfe and 0xff are never used in the UTF-8 encoding.
44 * The first byte of a multibyte sequence which represents a single non-
46 ASCII UCS character is always in the range 0xc0 to 0xfd and indicates
47 how long this multibyte sequence is. All further bytes in a multi‐
48 byte sequence are in the range 0x80 to 0xbf. This allows easy resyn‐
49 chronization and makes the encoding stateless and robust against
50 missing bytes.
51 * UTF-8 encoded UCS characters may be up to six bytes long, however the
53 Unicode standard specifies no characters above 0x10ffff, so Unicode
54 characters can only be up to four bytes long in UTF-8.
55 Encoding
57 The following byte sequences are used to represent a character. The
58 sequence to be used depends on the UCS code number of the character:
59 0x00000000 - 0x0000007F:
61 0xxxxxxx
62 0x00000080 - 0x000007FF:
64 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
65 0x00000800 - 0x0000FFFF:
67 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
68 0x00010000 - 0x001FFFFF:
70 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
71 0x00200000 - 0x03FFFFFF:
73 111110xx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
74 0x04000000 - 0x7FFFFFFF:
76 1111110x 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
77 The xxx bit positions are filled with the bits of the character code
79 number in binary representation. Only the shortest possible multibyte
80 sequence which can represent the code number of the character can be
81 used.
82 The UCS code values 0xd800–0xdfff (UTF-16 surrogates) as well as 0xfffe
84 and 0xffff (UCS noncharacters) should not appear in conforming UTF-8
85 streams.
86 Example
88 The Unicode character 0xa9 = 1010 1001 (the copyright sign) is encoded
89 in UTF-8 as
90 11000010 10101001 = 0xc2 0xa9
92 and character 0x2260 = 0010 0010 0110 0000 (the "not equal" symbol) is
94 encoded as:
95 11100010 10001001 10100000 = 0xe2 0x89 0xa0
97 Application Notes
99 Users have to select a UTF-8 locale, for example with
100 export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
102 in order to activate the UTF-8 support in applications.
104 Application software that has to be aware of the used character encod‐
106 ing should always set the locale with for example
107 setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")
109 and programmers can then test the expression
111 strcmp(nl_langinfo(CODESET), "UTF-8") == 0
113 to determine whether a UTF-8 locale has been selected and whether
115 therefore all plaintext standard input and output, terminal communica‐
116 tion, plaintext file content, filenames and environment variables are
117 encoded in UTF-8.
118 Programmers accustomed to single-byte encodings such as US-ASCII or ISO
120 8859 have to be aware that two assumptions made so far are no longer
121 valid in UTF-8 locales. Firstly, a single byte does not necessarily
122 correspond any more to a single character. Secondly, since modern ter‐
123 minal emulators in UTF-8 mode also support Chinese, Japanese, and
124 Korean double-width characters as well as nonspacing combining charac‐
125 ters, outputting a single character does not necessarily advance the
126 cursor by one position as it did in ASCII. Library functions such as
127 mbsrtowcs(3) and wcswidth(3) should be used today to count characters
128 and cursor positions.
129 The official ESC sequence to switch from an ISO 2022 encoding scheme
131 (as used for instance by VT100 terminals) to UTF-8 is ESC % G
132 ("\x1b%G"). The corresponding return sequence from UTF-8 to ISO 2022
133 is ESC % @ ("\x1b%@"). Other ISO 2022 sequences (such as for switching
134 the G0 and G1 sets) are not applicable in UTF-8 mode.
135 It can be hoped that in the foreseeable future, UTF-8 will replace
137 ASCII and ISO 8859 at all levels as the common character encoding on
138 POSIX systems, leading to a significantly richer environment for han‐
139 dling plain text.
140 Security
142 The Unicode and UCS standards require that producers of UTF-8 shall use
143 the shortest form possible, for example, producing a two-byte sequence
144 with first byte 0xc0 is nonconforming. Unicode 3.1 has added the
145 requirement that conforming programs must not accept non-shortest forms
146 in their input. This is for security reasons: if user input is checked
147 for possible security violations, a program might check only for the
148 ASCII version of "/../" or ";" or NUL and overlook that there are many
149 non-ASCII ways to represent these things in a non-shortest UTF-8 encod‐
150 ing.
151 Standards
153 ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000, Unicode 3.1, RFC 2279, Plan 9.
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156 nl_langinfo(3), setlocale(3), charsets(7), unicode(7)
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159 This page is part of release 3.25 of the Linux man-pages project. A
160 description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
161 be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
162GNU 2001-05-11 UTF-8(7)