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Unicode Demystified
book

Unicode Demystified

by Richard Gillam
September 2002
Intermediate to advanced
896 pages
21h 3m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Unicode Demystified

UTF-16 and the Surrogate Mechanism

That brings us to UTF-16. UTF-16 is the oldest Unicode encoding form, although its name goes back only a few years.

UTF-16 maps the 21-bit abstract code point values to sequences of 16-bit code units. For code point values in the BMP, which represent the vast majority of characters in any typical written document, this is a straightforward mapping. You just lop the five zero bits off the top, as shown in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1. UTF-16 mapping for BMP characters

For characters from the supplementary planes, the transformation is more complicated. To represent supplementary-plane characters, Unicode sets aside 2,048 ...

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Publisher Resources

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