CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 1: CJKV Information Processing Overview

themselves—not the underlying bits of each byte—are reversed depending on endianness.

is is precisely why endianness is also referred to as byte order. e term endian is used

to describe what impact the byte at the end has on the overall value. e UTF-16 value

for the ASCII “space” character, 2, is < 2> for big-endian machines and <2 >

for little-endian ones.

Now that you understand the concept of endianness, the real question that needs answer-

ing is when endianness matters. Please keep reading….

What Are Multiple-Byte and Wide Characters?

If you have ever read comprehensive books and materials about ANSI C, you more than

likely came across the terms multiple-byte and wide characters. ose documents typi-

cally don’t do those terms justice, in that they are not fully explained. Here you’ll get a

denitive answer.

When dealing with encoding methods that are processed on a per-byte basis, endianness

or byte order is irrelevant. e bytes that compose each character have only one order, re-

gardless of the underlying architecture. ese encoding methods support what are known

as multiple-byte characters. In other words, these encoding methods use the byte as their

code unit.

So, what encoding methods support multiple-byte characters? Table 1-21 provides an in-

complete yet informative list of encoding methods that support multiple-b ...