Why does sql database use UTF-8 Encoding? do they both use 8-bit to store a character?
+1
A:
For "normal" characters, only 8 bits are used. For characters that do not fit in 8 bits more bits can be used. This makes UTF-8 is a variable length encoding.
Wikipedia has a good article on UTF-8.
ASCII only defines 128 character. So only 7 bits. But is normally stored with 8 bits/character. RS232 (old serial communication) can be used with bytes of 7 bits.
GvS
2010-05-04 14:45:14
The amount of space used depends on the character code. For some characters, it'll use up to 4 bytes for a single char. The ones that use that much space aren't in the BMP, though.
cHao
2010-05-04 14:49:49
A:
ASCII can only represent a limited number of characters at one time. It isn't very useful to represent any language that isn't based on a Latin character set. However, UTF-8 which is an encoding standard for UCS-4 (Unicode) can represent almost any language. It does this by chaining multiple bytes together to represent one character (or glyph to be more correct).
Torlack
2010-05-04 14:46:22
What do you mean? UTF-16 is just another encoding standard. UTF-7,8,16,32 are all encoding standards that encode UCS-4 (this wasn't always the case, and I wouldn't be shocked if there are still some exceptions)
Torlack
2010-05-04 22:17:35
+1
A:
UTF-8 is used to support a large range of characters. In UTF-8, up to 4 bytes can be used to represent a single character.
Joel has written an article on this subject that you may want to refer to
Bo Tian
2010-05-04 14:53:53