UTF-16

In the late 1980s, work began on developing a uniform encoding for a "Universal Character Set" (UCS) that would replace earlier language-specific encodings with one coordinated system. The goal was to include all required characters from most of the world's languages, as well as symbols from technical domains such as science, mathematics, and music. The original idea was to replace the typical 256-character encodings, which required 1 byte per character, with an encoding using 65,536 (2¹⁶) values, which would require 2 bytes (16 bits) per character.

Two groups worked on this in parallel, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 and the Unicode Consortium, the latter representing mostly manufacturers of computing equipment. The two groups attempted to synchronize their character assignments so that the developing encodings would be mutually compatible. The early 2-byte encoding was originally called "Unicode", but is now called "UCS-2".^[1][2][11]

When it became increasingly clear that 2¹⁶ characters would not suffice,^[12] IEEE introduced a larger 31-bit space and an encoding (UCS-4) that would require 4 bytes per character. This was resisted by the Unicode Consortium, both because 4 bytes per character wasted a lot of memory and disk space, and because some manufacturers were already heavily invested in 2-byte-per-character technology. The UTF-16 encoding scheme was developed as a compromise and introduced with version 2.0 of the Unicode standard in July 1996.^[13] It is fully specified in RFC 2781, published in 2000 by the IETF.^[14][15]

UTF-16 is specified in the latest versions of both the international standard ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Standard. "UCS-2 should now be considered obsolete. It no longer refers to an encoding form in either 10646 or the Unicode Standard."^[1][2] UTF-16 will never be extended to support a larger number of code points or to support the code points that were replaced by surrogates, as this would violate the Unicode Stability Policy with respect to general category or surrogate code points.^[16] (Any scheme that remains a self-synchronizing code would require allocating at least one Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) code point to start a sequence. Changing the purpose of a code point is disallowed.)

Each Unicode code point is encoded either as one or two 16-bit code units. Code points less than 2¹⁶ ("in the BMP") are encoded with a single 16-bit code unit equal to the numerical value of the code point, as in the older UCS-2. Code points greater than or equal to 2¹⁶ ("above the BMP") are encoded using two 16-bit code units. These two 16-bit code units are chosen from the UTF-16 surrogate range 0xD800–0xDFFF which had not previously been assigned to characters. Values in this range are not used as characters, and UTF-16 provides no legal way to code them as individual code points. A UTF-16 stream, therefore, consists of single 16-bit codes outside the surrogate range, and pairs of 16-bit values that are within the surrogate range.

U' = yyyyyyyyyyxxxxxxxxxx  // U - 0x10000
W1 = 110110yyyyyyyyyy      // 0xD800 + yyyyyyyyyy
W2 = 110111xxxxxxxxxx      // 0xDC00 + xxxxxxxxxx

U+D800 to U+DFFF (surrogates)

This section needs additional citations for verification. (August 2023)

The official Unicode standard says that no UTF forms, including UTF-16, can encode the surrogate code points. Since these will never be assigned a character, there should be no reason to encode them. However, Windows allows unpaired surrogates in filenames^[19] and other places, which generally means they have to be supported by software in spite of their exclusion from the Unicode standard.

UCS-2, UTF-8, and UTF-32 can encode these code points in trivial and obvious ways, and a large amount of software does so, even though the standard states that such arrangements should be treated as encoding errors.

It is possible to unambiguously encode an unpaired surrogate (a high surrogate code point not followed by a low one, or a low one not preceded by a high one) in the format of UTF-16 by using a code unit equal to the code point. The result is not valid UTF-16, but the majority of UTF-16 encoder and decoder implementations do this when translating between encodings.^{[citation needed]}

UTF-16 and UCS-2 produce a sequence of 16-bit code units. Since most communication and storage protocols are defined for bytes, and each unit thus takes two 8-bit bytes, the order of the bytes may depend on the endianness (byte order) of the computer architecture.

To assist in recognizing the byte order of code units, UTF-16 allows a byte order mark (BOM), a code point with the value U+FEFF, to precede the first actual coded value.^[c] (U+FEFF is the invisible zero-width non-breaking space/ZWNBSP character).^[d] If the endian architecture of the decoder matches that of the encoder, the decoder detects the 0xFEFF value, but an opposite-endian decoder interprets the BOM as the noncharacter value U+FFFE reserved for this purpose. This incorrect result provides a hint to perform byte-swapping for the remaining values.

If the BOM is missing, RFC 2781 recommends^[e] that big-endian (BE) encoding be assumed. In practice, due to Windows using little-endian (LE) order by default, many applications assume little-endian encoding. It is also reliable to detect endianness by looking for null bytes, on the assumption that characters less than U+0100 are very common. If more even bytes (starting at 0) are null, then it is big-endian.

The standard also allows the byte order to be stated explicitly by specifying UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE as the encoding type. When the byte order is specified explicitly this way, a BOM is specifically not supposed to be prepended to the text, and a U+FEFF at the beginning should be handled as a ZWNBSP character. Most applications ignore a BOM in all cases despite this rule.

For Internet protocols, IANA has approved "UTF-16", "UTF-16BE", and "UTF-16LE" as the names for these encodings (the names are case insensitive). The aliases UTF_16 or UTF16 may be meaningful in some programming languages or software applications, but they are not standard names in Internet protocols.

Similar designations, UCS-2BE and UCS-2LE, are used to show versions of UCS-2.

A "character" may use any number of Unicode code points.^[20] For instance an emoji flag character takes 8 bytes, since it is "constructed from a pair of Unicode scalar values"^[21] (and those values are outside the BMP and require 4 bytes each). UTF-16 in no way assists in "counting characters" or in "measuring the width of a string".

UTF-16 is often claimed to be more space-efficient than UTF-8 for East Asian languages, since it uses two bytes for characters that take 3 bytes in UTF-8. Since real text contains many spaces, numbers, punctuation, markup (for e.g. web pages), and control characters, which take only one byte in UTF-8, this is only true for artificially constructed dense blocks of text.^{[citation needed]} A more serious claim can be made for Devanagari and Bengali, which use multi-letter words and all the letters take 3 bytes in UTF-8 and only 2 in UTF-16.

In addition the Chinese Unicode encoding standard GB 18030 always produces files the same size or smaller than UTF-16 for all languages, not just for Chinese (it does this by sacrificing self-synchronization).

UTF-16 is used for text in the OS API of all currently supported versions of Microsoft Windows (and including at least all since Windows CE/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7^[22]) including Windows 10. In Windows XP, no code point above U+FFFF is included in any font delivered with Windows for European languages.^[23][24] Older Windows NT systems (prior to Windows 2000) only support UCS-2.^[25] Only since Windows 10 insider build 17035 in May 2019 has it been possible to use UTF-8^[26] and Microsoft has stated that "UTF-16 [..] is a unique burden that Windows places on code that targets multiple platforms."^[27] Files and network data tend to be a mix of UTF-16, UTF-8, and legacy byte encodings.

SMS text messaging effectively uses UTF-16. The documentation specifies UCS-2 but UTF-16 is necessary for Emoji to work.^[28]

The IBM i operating system designates CCSID (code page) 13488 for UCS-2 encoding and CCSID 1200 for UTF-16 encoding, though the system treats them both as UTF-16.^[29]

UTF-16 is used by the Qualcomm BREW operating systems; the .NET environments; and the Qt cross-platform graphical widget toolkit.

Symbian OS used in Nokia S60 handsets and Sony Ericsson UIQ handsets uses UCS-2. iPhone handsets use UTF-16 for Short Message Service instead of UCS-2 described in the 3GPP TS 23.038 (GSM) and IS-637 (CDMA) standards.^[30]

The Joliet file system, used in CD-ROM media, encodes file names using UCS-2BE (up to sixty-four Unicode characters per file name).

Python version 2.0 officially only used UCS-2 internally, but the UTF-8 decoder to "Unicode" produced correct UTF-16. There was also the ability to compile Python so that it used UTF-32 internally, this was sometimes done on Unix. Python 3.3 switched internal storage to use one of ISO-8859-1, UCS-2, or UTF-32 depending on the largest code point in the string.^[31] Python 3.12 drops some functionality (for CPython extensions) to make it easier to migrate to UTF-8 for all strings.^[32]

Java originally used UCS-2, and added UTF-16 supplementary character support in J2SE 5.0. Despite awareness of UTF-8^[33] all strings are still UTF-16 (as of Java 9 strings containing only codes less than 256 can be "compressed" to bytes, it ISO-8859-1 encoding^[34]).

JavaScript may use UCS-2 or UTF-16.^[35] As of ES2015, string methods and regular expression flags have been added to the language that permit handling strings from an encoding-agnostic perspective.

UEFI uses UTF-16 to encode strings by default.

Swift, Apple's preferred application language, used UTF-16 to store strings until version 5 which switched to UTF-8.^[36]

Quite a few languages make the encoding part of the string object, and thus store and support a large set of encodings including UTF-16. Most consider UTF-16 and UCS-2 to be different encodings. Examples are the PHP language^[37] and MySQL.^[38]

A method to determine what encoding a system is using internally is to ask for the "length" of string containing a single non-BMP character. If the length is 2 then UTF-16 is being used. 4 indicates UTF-8. 3 or 6 may indicate CESU-8. 1 may indicate UTF-32, but more likely indicates the language decodes the string to code points before measuring the "length".

In many languages, quoted strings need a new syntax for quoting non-BMP characters, as the C-style "\uXXXX" syntax explicitly limits itself to 4 hex digits. The following examples illustrate the syntax for the non-BMP character U+1D11E 𝄞 MUSICAL SYMBOL G CLEF:

• The most common (C++, C#, D, and several other languages) is an upper-case 'U' with 8 hex digits such as "\U0001D11E".^[39]
• Java 7 regular expressions, ICU, and Perl, use "\x{1D11E}".
• ECMAScript 2015 (JavaScript) uses "\u{1D11E}".
• In many other cases (such as Java outside of regular expressions),^[40] the only way to get non-BMP characters is to enter the surrogate halves individually: "\uD834\uDD1E".

• Comparison of Unicode encodings
• Plane (Unicode)
• UTF-8
• CESU-8
• UTF-32