CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Advice to Readers

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almost always provide a facility for indicating the byte order. Table 1-22 lists some encod-

ing methods that make use of wide characters, all of which are encoding methods for

Unicode.

Wide characters—encoding methodsTable 1-22.

Encoding Encoding length

UCS-2 16-bit xed

UTF-16 16-bit variable-length

UTF-32 32-bit xed

Sometimes the encodings listed in Table 1-22 are recommended to use the Byte Order

Mark (BOM) at the beginning of a le to explicitly indicate the byte order. e BOM is

covered in greater detail in Chapter 4.

It is with endianness or byte order that we can more easily distinguish multiple-byte from

wide characters. Multiple-byte characters have the same byte order, regardless of the un-

derlying processor architecture. e byte order of wide characters is determined by the

underlying processor architecture and must be agged or indicated in the data itself.

Advice to Readers

is chapter serves as an introduction to the rest of this book, and is meant to whet your

appetite for what lies ahead in the pages that follow. When reading the chapters of this

book, I suggest that you focus on the sections that cover or relate to Unicode, because they

are likely to be of immediate value and benet. Information about legacy character sets

and encodings is still of great value because it relates to Unicode, oen directly, and also

serves to chronicle how we got ...