Difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16? - java

Difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16?
Why do we need these?
MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
String text = "This is some text";
md.update(text.getBytes("UTF-8")); // Change this to "UTF-16" if needed
byte[] digest = md.digest();

I believe there are a lot of good articles about this around the Web, but here is a short summary.
Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable length encodings. However, in UTF-8 a character may occupy a minimum of 8 bits, while in UTF-16 character length starts with 16 bits.
Main UTF-8 pros:
Basic ASCII characters like digits, Latin characters with no accents, etc. occupy one byte which is identical to US-ASCII representation. This way all US-ASCII strings become valid UTF-8, which provides decent backwards compatibility in many cases.
No null bytes, which allows to use null-terminated strings, this introduces a great deal of backwards compatibility too.
UTF-8 is independent of byte order, so you don't have to worry about Big Endian / Little Endian issue.
Main UTF-8 cons:
Many common characters have different length, which slows indexing by codepoint and calculating a codepoint count terribly.
Even though byte order doesn't matter, sometimes UTF-8 still has BOM (byte order mark) which serves to notify that the text is encoded in UTF-8, and also breaks compatibility with ASCII software even if the text only contains ASCII characters. Microsoft software (like Notepad) especially likes to add BOM to UTF-8.
Main UTF-16 pros:
BMP (basic multilingual plane) characters, including Latin, Cyrillic, most Chinese (the PRC made support for some codepoints outside BMP mandatory), most Japanese can be represented with 2 bytes. This speeds up indexing and calculating codepoint count in case the text does not contain supplementary characters.
Even if the text has supplementary characters, they are still represented by pairs of 16-bit values, which means that the total length is still divisible by two and allows to use 16-bit char as the primitive component of the string.
Main UTF-16 cons:
Lots of null bytes in US-ASCII strings, which means no null-terminated strings and a lot of wasted memory.
Using it as a fixed-length encoding “mostly works” in many common scenarios (especially in US / EU / countries with Cyrillic alphabets / Israel / Arab countries / Iran and many others), often leading to broken support where it doesn't. This means the programmers have to be aware of surrogate pairs and handle them properly in cases where it matters!
It's variable length, so counting or indexing codepoints is costly, though less than UTF-8.
In general, UTF-16 is usually better for in-memory representation because BE/LE is irrelevant there (just use native order) and indexing is faster (just don't forget to handle surrogate pairs properly). UTF-8, on the other hand, is extremely good for text files and network protocols because there is no BE/LE issue and null-termination often comes in handy, as well as ASCII-compatibility.

They're simply different schemes for representing Unicode characters.
Both are variable-length - UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for all characters in the basic multilingual plane (BMP) which contains most characters in common use.
UTF-8 uses between 1 and 3 bytes for characters in the BMP, up to 4 for characters in the current Unicode range of U+0000 to U+1FFFFF, and is extensible up to U+7FFFFFFF if that ever becomes necessary... but notably all ASCII characters are represented in a single byte each.
For the purposes of a message digest it won't matter which of these you pick, so long as everyone who tries to recreate the digest uses the same option.
See this page for more about UTF-8 and Unicode.
(Note that all Java characters are UTF-16 code points within the BMP; to represent characters above U+FFFF you need to use surrogate pairs in Java.)

Security: Use only UTF-8
Difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16? Why do we need these?
There have been at least a couple of security vulnerabilities in implementations of UTF-16. See Wikipedia for details.
CVE-2008-2938
CVE-2012-2135
WHATWG and W3C have now declared that only UTF-8 is to be used on the Web.
The [security] problems outlined here go away when exclusively using UTF-8, which is one of the many reasons that is now the mandatory encoding for all things.
Other groups are saying the same.
So while UTF-16 may continue being used internally by some systems such as Java and Windows, what little use of UTF-16 you may have seen in the past for data files, data exchange, and such, will likely fade away entirely.

This is unrelated to UTF-8/16 (in general, although it does convert to UTF16 and the BE/LE part can be set w/ a single line), yet below is the fastest way to convert String to byte[]. For instance: good exactly for the case provided (hash code). String.getBytes(enc) is relatively slow.
static byte[] toBytes(String s){
byte[] b=new byte[s.length()*2];
ByteBuffer.wrap(b).asCharBuffer().put(s);
return b;
}

Simple way to differentiate UTF-8 and UTF-16 is to identify commonalities between them.
Other than sharing same unicode number for given character, each one is their own format.
UTF-8 try to represent, every unicode number given to character with one byte(If it is ASCII), else 2 two bytes, else 4 bytes and so on...
UTF-16 try to represent, every unicode number given to character with two byte to start with. If two bytes are not sufficient, then uses 4 bytes. IF that is also not sufficient, then uses 6 bytes.
Theoretically, UTF-16 is more space efficient, but in practical UTF-8 is more space efficient as most of the characters(98% of data) for processing are ASCII and UTF-8 try to represent them with single byte and UTF-16 try to represent them with 2 bytes.
Also, UTF-8 is superset of ASCII encoding. So every app that expects ASCII data would also accepted by UTF-8 processor. This is not true for UTF-16. UTF-16 could not understand ASCII, and this is big hurdle for UTF-16 adoption.
Another point to note is, all UNICODE as of now could be fit in 4 bytes of UTF-8 maximum(Considering all languages of world). This is same as UTF-16 and no real saving in space compared to UTF-8 ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/8505038/3343801 )
So, people use UTF-8 where ever possible.

Related

Java 8 UTF-16 isn't default charset but UTF-8

I been doing some coding with String in Java8,Java 11 but this question is based on Java 8. I have this little snippet.
final char e = (char)200;//È
I just thought that the characters between 0.255[Ascii+extended Ascii] would always fit in a byte just because 2^8=256 but this seems not to be true i have try on the website https://mothereff.in/byte-counter and states that the character is taking 2 bytes can somebody please explain to me.
Another question in a lot of post states that Java is UTF-16 but in my machine running Windows 7 is returning UTF-8 in this snippet.
String csn = Charset.defaultCharset().name();
Is this platform depent?
Other questions i have try this snippet.
final List<Charset>charsets = Arrays.asList(StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1,StandardCharsets.US_ASCII,StandardCharsets.UTF_16,StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
charsets.forEach(a->print(a,"È"));
System.out.println("getBytes");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString("È".getBytes()));
charsets.forEach(a->System.out.println(a+" "+Arrays.toString(sb.toString().getBytes(a))));
private void print(final Charset set,final CharSequence sb){
byte[] array = new byte[4];
set.newEncoder()
.encode(CharBuffer.wrap(sb), ByteBuffer.wrap(array), true);
final String buildedString = new String(array,set);
System.out.println(set+" "+Arrays.toString(array)+" "+buildedString+"<<>>"+buildedString.length());
}
And prints
run:
ISO-8859-1 [-56, 0, 0, 0] È//PERFECT USING 1 BYTE WHICH IS -56
US-ASCII [0, 0, 0, 0] //DONT GET IT SEE THIS ITEM FOR LATER
UTF-16 [-2, -1, 0, -56] È<<>>1 //WHAT IS -2,-1 BYTE USED FOR? I HAVE TRY WITH OTHER EXAMPLES AND THEY ALWAYS APPEAR AM I LOSING TWO BYTES HERE??
UTF-8 [-61, -120, 0, 0] 2 È //SEEMS TO MY CHARACTER NEEDS TWO BYTES?? I THOUGHT THAT CODE=200 WOULD REQUIRE ONLY ONE
getBytes
[-61, -120]//OK MY UTF-8 REPRESENTATION
ISO-8859-1 [-56]//OK
US-ASCII [63]//OK BUT WHY WHEN I ENCODE IN ASCCI DOESNT GET ANY BYTE ENCODED?
UTF-16 [-2, -1, 0, -56]//AGAIN WHAT ARE -2,-1 IN THE LEADING BYTES?
UTF-8 [-61, -120]//OK
I have try
System.out.println(new String(new byte[]{-1,-2},"UTF-16"));//SIMPLE "" I AM WASTING THIS 2 BYTES??
In resume.
Why UTF-16 always has two leading bytes are they wasted? new byte[]{-1,-2}
Why when i encode "È" i dont get any bytes in ASCCI Charset but when i do È.getBytes(StandardCharsets.US_ASCII) i get {63}?
Java uses UTF-16 but in my case UTF-8 is platform depend??
Sorry if this post is confussing
Environment
Windows 7 64 Bits Netbeans 8.2 with Java 1.8.0_121
First question
For your first question: those bytes are the BOM code and they specify the byte order (whether the least or most significant comes first) of multibyte encoding such as UTF-16.
Second question
Every ASCII character can be encoded as a single byte in UTF-8. But ASCII is not an 8-bit encoding, it uses 7 bits for every character. And in fact, all Unicode character with code points >= 128 require at least two bytes. (The reason is that you need a way to distinguish between 200 and a multibyte code point whose first byte happens to be 200. UTF-8 solves this by using the bytes >= 128 to represent multibyte codepoints.)
'È' is not an ASCII character, so it cannot be represented in ASCII. This explains the second output: 63 is ASCII for the character '?'. And indeed, the Javadoc for the getBytes(Charset) method specifies that unmappable input is mapped to "the default replacement byte array", in this case '?'. On the other hand, to obtain the first ASCII byte array you used the CharsetEncoder directly, which is a more low-level API and does not perform such automatic replacements. (When you would have checked the result of the encode method, you would have found it to have returned a CoderResult instance representing an error.)
Third question
Java 8 Strings use UTF-16 internally, but when communicating with other software, different encodings may be expected, such as UTF-8. The Charset.defaultCharset() method returns the default character set of the virtual machine, which depends on the locale and character set of the operating system, not on the encoding used internally by Java strings.
Let's back up a bit…
Java's text datatypes use the UTF-16 character encoding of the Unicode character set. (As do, VB4/5/6/A/Script, JavaScript, .NET, ….) You can see this in the various operations you do with the string API: indexing, length, ….
Libraries support converting between the text datatypes and byte arrays using various encodings. Some of them are categorized as "Extended ASCII", but stating that is a very poor substitute for naming the character encoding actually being used.
Some operating systems allow the user to designate a default character encoding. (Most users don't know or care, though.) Java attempts to pick this up. It is only useful when the program understands that input from the user is that character encoding or that output should be. This century, users dealing in text files prefer to use a specific encoding, communicate them unchanged across systems, don't appreciate lossy conversions and therefore don't have any use for this concept. From a program's point of view, it is never what you want unless it is exactly what you want.
Where a conversion would be lossy, you have the choice of a replacement character (such a '?'), omitting it, or throwing an exception.
A character encoding is a map between a codepoint (integer) of a character set and one or more code units, according to the definition of the encoding. A code unit is a fixed size and the number of code units needed for a codepoint, might vary by codepoint.
In libraries, it is not generally useful to have an array of code units so they take the further step of converting to/from an array of bytes. byte values do range from -128 to 127, however, that's the Java interpretation as two's complement 8-bit integers. As the bytes are understood to be encoding text, the values would be interpret according to the rules of the character encoding.
Because some Unicode encodings, have code units more than one byte long, byte order becomes important. So, at the byte array level, there is UTF-16 Big Endian and UTF-16 Little Endian. When communicating a text file or stream, you would send the bytes and well as having a shared knowledge of the encoding. This "metadata" is required for understanding. So, UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE, for example. To make that a bit easier, Unicode allows some metadata beginning of the file or stream to indicate the byte order. It is called the byte-order mark (BOM) So, the external metadata can share the encoding (say, UTF-16), while the internal metadata shares the byte order. Unicode allows the BOM to be present even when byte order is not relevant, such as UTF-8. So, if the understanding is that the bytes are text encoded with any Unicode encoding and a BOM is present, then it's a very simple matter to figure out which Unicode encoding it is and what the byte order is, if relavent.
1) You are seeing the BOM in some of your Unicode encoding outputs.
2) È is not in the ASCII character set. What would want to happen in this case? I often prefer an exception.
3) The system you were using, for your account, at the time of your tests, may have had UTF-8 as the default character encoding, Is that important to the way you want and have encoded your text files on that system?

String that cannot be represented in UTF-8

I am creating a set of tests for the size of a String to do so I am using something like this myString.getBytes("UTF-8").length > MAX_SIZE for which java has a checked exception UnsupportedEncodingException.
Just for curiosity, and to further consider other possible test scenarios, is there a text that cannot be represented by UTF-8 character encoding?
BTW: I did my homework, but nowhere (that I can find) specifies that indeed UTF-8/Unicode includes ALL the characters which are possible. I know that its size is 2^32 and many of them are still empty, but the question remains.
The official FAQ from the Unicode Consortium is pretty clear on the matter, and is a great source of information on all questions related to UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.
In particular, notice the following quote (emphasis mine):
Q: What is a UTF?
A: A Unicode transformation format (UTF) is an
algorithmic mapping from every Unicode code point (except surrogate
code points) to a unique byte sequence. The ISO/IEC 10646 standard
uses the term “UCS transformation format” for UTF; the two terms are
merely synonyms for the same concept.
Each UTF is reversible, thus every UTF supports lossless round
tripping: mapping from any Unicode coded character sequence S to a
sequence of bytes and back will produce S again. To ensure round
tripping, a UTF mapping must map all code points (except surrogate
code points) to unique byte sequences. This includes reserved
(unassigned) code points and the 66 noncharacters (including U+FFFE
and U+FFFF).
So, as you can see, by definition, all UTF encodings (including UTF-8) must be able to handle all Unicode code points (except the surrogate code points of course, but they are not real characters anyways).
Additionally, here is a quote directly from the Unicode Standard that also talks about this:
The Unicode Standard supports three character encoding forms: UTF-32,
UTF-16, and UTF-8. Each encoding form maps the Unicode code points
U+0000..U+D7FF and U+E000..U+10FFFF to unique code unit sequences.
As you can see, the specified range of characters covers the whole assigned Unicode range (excluding the surrogate character range of course).
is there a text that cannot be represented by UTF-8 character encoding?
Java strings use UTF-16, and standard UTF-8 is designed to handle every Unicode codepoint that UTF-16 can handle (and then some).
However, do be careful, because Java also uses a Modified UTF-8 in some areas, and that does have some differences/limitations from standard UTF-8.

Why Java char uses UTF-16?

I have been reading about how Unicode code points have evolved over time, including this article by Joel Spolsky, which says:
Some people are under the misconception that Unicode is simply a 16-bit code where each character takes 16 bits and therefore there are 65,536 possible characters. This is not, actually, correct.
But despite all this reading, I couldn't find the real reason that Java uses UTF-16 for a char.
Isn't UTF-8 far more efficient than UTF-16? For example, if I had a string which contains 1024 letters of ASCII scoped characters, UTF-16 will take 1024 * 2 bytes (2KB) of memory.
But if Java used UTF-8, it would be just 1KB of data. Even if the string has a few character which needs to 2 bytes, it will still only take about a kilobyte. For example, suppose in addition to the 1024 characters, there were 10 characters of "字" (code-point U+5b57, UTF-8 encoding e5 ad 97). In UTF-8, this will still take only (1024 * 1 byte) + (10 * 3 bytes) = 1KB + 30 bytes.
So this doesn't answer my question. 1KB + 30 bytes for UTF-8 is clearly less memory than 2KB for UTF-16.
Of course it makes sense that Java doesn't use ASCII for a char, but why does it not use UTF-8, which has a clean mechanism for handling arbitrary multi-byte characters when they come up? UTF-16 looks like a waste of memory in any string which has lots of non-multibyte chars.
Is there some good reason for UTF-16 that I'm missing?
Java used UCS-2 before transitioning over UTF-16 in 2004/2005. The reason for the original choice of UCS-2 is mainly historical:
Unicode was originally designed as a fixed-width 16-bit character encoding. The primitive data type char in the Java programming language was intended to take advantage of this design by providing a simple data type that could hold any character.
This, and the birth of UTF-16, is further explained by the Unicode FAQ page:
Originally, Unicode was designed as a pure 16-bit encoding, aimed at representing all modern scripts. (Ancient scripts were to be represented with private-use characters.) Over time, and especially after the addition of over 14,500 composite characters for compatibility with legacy sets, it became clear that 16-bits were not sufficient for the user community. Out of this arose UTF-16.
As #wero has already mentioned, random access cannot be done efficiently with UTF-8. So all things weighed up, UCS-2 was seemingly the best choice at the time, particularly as no supplementary characters had been allocated by that stage. This then left UTF-16 as the easiest natural progression beyond that.
Historically, one reason was the performance characteristics of random access or iterating over the characters of a String:
UTF-8 encoding uses a variable number (1-4) bytes to encode a Unicode character. Therefore accessing a character by index: String.charAt(i) would be way more complicated to implement and slower than the array access used by java.lang.String.
Even today, Python uses a fixed-width format for Strings internally, storing either 1, 2, or 4 bytes per character depending on the maximum size of a character in that string.
Of course, this is no longer a pure benefit in Java, since, as nj_ explains, Java no longer uses a fixed-with format. But at the time the language was developed, Unicode was a fixed-width format (now called UCS-2), and this would have been an advantage.

Is there a drastic difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16

I call a webservice, that gives me back a response xml that has UTF-8 encoding. I checked that in java using getAllHeaders() method.
Now, in my java code, I take that response and then do some processing on it. And later, pass it on to a different service.
Now, I googled a bit and found out that by default the encoding in Java for strings is UTF-16.
In my response xml, one of the elements had a character É. Now this got screwed in the post processing request that I make to a different service.
Instead of sending É, it sent some jibberish stuff. Now I wanted to know, will there be really a lot of difference in the two of these encodings? And if I wanted to know what will É convert from UTF-8 to UTF-16, then how can I do that?
Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable length encodings. However, in UTF-8 a character may occupy a minimum of 8 bits, while in UTF-16 character length starts with 16 bits.
Main UTF-8 pros:
Basic ASCII characters like digits, Latin characters with no
accents, etc. occupy one byte which is identical to US-ASCII
representation. This way all US-ASCII strings become valid UTF-8,
which provides decent backwards compatibility in many cases.
No null bytes, which allows to use null-terminated strings, this
introduces a great deal of backwards compatibility too.
Main UTF-8 cons:
Many common characters have different length, which slows indexing
and calculating a string length terribly.
Main UTF-16 pros:
Most reasonable characters, like Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese
can be represented with 2 bytes. Unless really exotic characters are
needed, this means that the 16-bit subset of UTF-16 can be used as a
fixed-length encoding, which speeds indexing.
Main UTF-16 cons:
Lots of null bytes in US-ASCII strings, which means no
null-terminated strings and a lot of wasted memory.
In general, UTF-16 is usually better for in-memory representation while UTF-8 is extremely good for text files and network protocol
There are two things:
the encoding in which you exchange data;
the internal string representation of Java.
You should not be preoccupied with the second point ;) The thing is to use the appropriate methods to convert from your data (byte arrays) to Strings (char arrays ultimately), and to convert form Strings to your data.
The most basic classes you can think of are CharsetDecoder and CharsetEncoder. But there are plenty others. String.getBytes(), all Readers and Writers are but two possible methods. And there are all static methods of Character as well.
If you see gibberish at some point, it means you failed to decode or encode from the original byte data to Java strings. But again, the fact that Java strings use UTF-16 is not relevant here.
In particular, you should be aware that when you create a Reader or Writer, you should specify the encoding; if you fail to do so, the default JVM encoding will be used, and it may, or may not, be UTF-8.
This Website provide UTF TO UTF Conversion
http://www.fileformat.info/convert/text/utf2utf.htm
UTF-32 is arguably the most human-readable of the Unicode Encoding Forms, because its big-endian hexadecimal representation is simply the Unicode Scalar Value without the “U+” prefix and zero-padded to eight digits and While a UTF-32 representation does make the programming model somewhat simpler, the increased average storage size has real drawbacks, making a complete transition to UTF-32 less compelling.
HOWEVER
UTF-32 is the same as the old UCS-4 encoding and remains fixed width. Why can this remain fixed width? As UTF-16 is now the format that can encode the least amount of characters it set the limit for all formats. It was defined that 1,112,064 was the total number of code points that will ever be defined by either Unicode or ISO 10646. Since Unicode is now only defined from 0 to 10FFFF UTF-32 sounds a bit like a pointless encoding now as it's 32 bit wide, but only ever about 21 bits are used which makes this very wasteful.
UTF-8: Generally speaking, you should use UTF-8. Most HTML documents use this encoding.
It uses at least 8 bits of data to store each character. This can lead to more efficient storage, especially when the text contains mostly English ASCII characters. But higher-order characters, such as non-ASCII characters, may require up to 24 bits each!
UTF-16:
This encoding uses at least 16 bits to encode characters, including lower-order ASCII characters and higher-order non-ASCII characters.
If you are encoding text consisting of mostly non-English or non-ASCII characters, UTF-16 may result in smaller file size. But if you use UTF-16 to encode mostly ASCII text, it will use up more space.

Why I need use encoding in String.getBytes(charsetName)

Ususally when I need to convert my string to byte[] I use getBytes() without param. I was checked it is not save I should use charset. Why I shoud do so - letter 'A' will always be parsed to 0x41? Is't it?
Ususally when I need to convert my string to byte[] I use getBytes() without param.
Stop doing that right now. I would suggest that you always specify an encoding. If you want to use the platform default encoding (which is what you'll get if you don't specify one), then do that explicitly so that it's clearer. But that should very rarely be the approach anyway. Personally I use UTF-8 in almost all cases.
Why I shoud do so - letter 'A' will always be parsed to 0x41? Is't it?
Nope. For example, using UTF-16, 'A' will be two bytes - 0x41 0x00 or 0x00 0x41 (depending on the endianness). In EBCDIC encodings it could be something completely different.
Most encodings treat ASCII characters in the same way - but characters outside ASCII are represented very differently in different encodings (and many encodings only support a subset of Unicode).
See my article on Unicode (C#-focused, but the principles are the same) for a few more details - and links to more information than you're ever likely to want.
Different character encodings lead to different ways characters get parsed. In Ascii, sure 'A' will parse to 0x41. In other encodings, this will be different.
This is why when you go to some webpages, you may see a bunch of weird characters. The browser doesn't know how to decode it, so it just decodes to the default.
Some background: When text is stored in files or sent between computers over a socket, the text characters are stored or sent as a sequence of bits, almost always grouped in 8-bit bytes. The characters all have defined numeric values in Unicode, so that 'A' always has the value 0x41 (well, there are actually two other A's in the Unicode character set, in the Greek and Russian alphabets, but that's not relevant). But there are many mechanisms for how those numeric codes are translated to a sequence of bits when storing in a file or sending to another computer. In UTF-8, 0x41 is represented as 8 bits (the byte 0x41), but other numeric values (code points) will be converted to 16 or more bits with an algorithm that rearranges the bits; in UTF-16, 0x41 is represented as 16 bits; and there are other encodings like JIS and some which are capable of representing some but not all of the Unicode characters. Since String.getBytes() was intended to return a byte array that contains the bytes to be sent to a file or socket, the method needs to know what encoding it's supposed to use when creating those bytes. Basically the encoding will have to be the same one that a program later reading a file, or a computer at the other end of the socket, expects it to be.

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