UTF-8(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual UTF-8(7)
NAME
UTF-8 - an ASCII compatible multibyte Unicode encoding
DESCRIPTION
The Unicode 3.0 character set occupies a 16-bit code space. The most
obvious Unicode encoding (known as UCS-2) consists of a sequence of
16-bit words. Such strings can contain—as part of many 16-bit charac-
ters—bytes such as '\0' or '/', which have a special meaning in file-
names and other C library function arguments. In addition, the majority
of UNIX tools expect ASCII files and can't read 16-bit words as charac-
ters without major modifications. For these reasons, UCS-2 is not a
suitable external encoding of Unicode in filenames, text files, environ-
ment variables, and so on. The ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Character Set
(UCS), a superset of Unicode, occupies an even larger code
space—31 bits—and the obvious UCS-4 encoding for it (a sequence of
32-bit words) has the same problems.
The UTF-8 encoding of Unicode and UCS does not have these problems and
is the common way in which Unicode is used on UNIX-style operating sys-
tems.
Properties
The UTF-8 encoding has the following nice properties:
• UCS characters 0x00000000 to 0x0000007f (the classic US-ASCII charac-
ters) are encoded simply as bytes 0x00 to 0x7f (ASCII compatibility).
This means that files and strings which contain only 7-bit ASCII
characters have the same encoding under both ASCII and UTF-8.
• All UCS characters greater than 0x7f are encoded as a multibyte se-
quence consisting only of bytes in the range 0x80 to 0xfd, so no
ASCII byte can appear as part of another character and there are no
problems with, for example, '\0' or '/'.
• The lexicographic sorting order of UCS-4 strings is preserved.
• All possible 2^31 UCS codes can be encoded using UTF-8.
• The bytes 0xc0, 0xc1, 0xfe, and 0xff are never used in the UTF-8 en-
coding.
• The first byte of a multibyte sequence which represents a single non-
ASCII UCS character is always in the range 0xc2 to 0xfd and indicates
how long this multibyte sequence is. All further bytes in a multi-
byte sequence are in the range 0x80 to 0xbf. This allows easy resyn-
chronization and makes the encoding stateless and robust against
missing bytes.
• UTF-8 encoded UCS characters may be up to six bytes long, however the
Unicode standard specifies no characters above 0x10ffff, so Unicode
characters can be only up to four bytes long in UTF-8.
Encoding
The following byte sequences are used to represent a character. The se-
quence to be used depends on the UCS code number of the character:
0x00000000 - 0x0000007F:
0xxxxxxx
0x00000080 - 0x000007FF:
110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
0x00000800 - 0x0000FFFF:
1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
0x00010000 - 0x001FFFFF:
11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
0x00200000 - 0x03FFFFFF:
111110xx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
0x04000000 - 0x7FFFFFFF:
1111110x 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
The xxx bit positions are filled with the bits of the character code
number in binary representation, most significant bit first (big-en-
dian). Only the shortest possible multibyte sequence which can repre-
sent the code number of the character can be used.
The UCS code values 0xd800–0xdfff (UTF-16 surrogates) as well as 0xfffe
and 0xffff (UCS noncharacters) should not appear in conforming UTF-8
streams. According to RFC 3629 no point above U+10FFFF should be used,
which limits characters to four bytes.
Example
The Unicode character 0xa9 = 1010 1001 (the copyright sign) is encoded
in UTF-8 as
11000010 10101001 = 0xc2 0xa9
and character 0x2260 = 0010 0010 0110 0000 (the "not equal" symbol) is
encoded as:
11100010 10001001 10100000 = 0xe2 0x89 0xa0
Application notes
Users have to select a UTF-8 locale, for example with
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
in order to activate the UTF-8 support in applications.
Application software that has to be aware of the used character encoding
should always set the locale with for example
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")
and programmers can then test the expression
strcmp(nl_langinfo(CODESET), "UTF-8") == 0
to determine whether a UTF-8 locale has been selected and whether there-
fore all plaintext standard input and output, terminal communication,
plaintext file content, filenames, and environment variables are encoded
in UTF-8.
Programmers accustomed to single-byte encodings such as US-ASCII or
ISO/IEC 8859 have to be aware that two assumptions made so far are no
longer valid in UTF-8 locales. Firstly, a single byte does not neces-
sarily correspond any more to a single character. Secondly, since mod-
ern terminal emulators in UTF-8 mode also support Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean double-width characters as well as nonspacing combining charac-
ters, outputting a single character does not necessarily advance the
cursor by one position as it did in ASCII. Library functions such as
mbsrtowcs(3) and wcswidth(3) should be used today to count characters
and cursor positions.
The official ESC sequence to switch from an ISO/IEC 2022 encoding scheme
(as used for instance by VT100 terminals) to UTF-8 is ESC % G
("\x1b%G"). The corresponding return sequence from UTF-8 to
ISO/IEC 2022 is ESC % @ ("\x1b%@"). Other ISO/IEC 2022 sequences (such
as for switching the G0 and G1 sets) are not applicable in UTF-8 mode.
Security
The Unicode and UCS standards require that producers of UTF-8 shall use
the shortest form possible, for example, producing a two-byte sequence
with first byte 0xc0 is nonconforming. Unicode 3.1 has added the re-
quirement that conforming programs must not accept non-shortest forms in
their input. This is for security reasons: if user input is checked for
possible security violations, a program might check only for the ASCII
version of "/../" or ";" or NUL and overlook that there are many non-
ASCII ways to represent these things in a non-shortest UTF-8 encoding.
Standards
ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000, Unicode 3.1, RFC 3629, Plan 9.
SEE ALSO
locale(1), nl_langinfo(3), setlocale(3), charsets(7), unicode(7)
Linux man-pages 6.9.1 2024-06-15 UTF-8(7)
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