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NAME | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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UTF-8(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual UTF-8(7)
UTF-8 - an ASCII compatible multibyte Unicode encoding
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 characters—bytes such as '\0' or '/', which have a
special meaning in filenames and other C library function
arguments. In addition, the majority of UNIX tools expect ASCII
files and can't read 16-bit words as characters without major
modifications. For these reasons, UCS-2 is not a suitable
external encoding of Unicode in filenames, text files,
environment 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 systems.
Properties
The UTF-8 encoding has the following nice properties:
• UCS characters 0x00000000 to 0x0000007f (the classic US-ASCII
characters) 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 sequence 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 encoding.
• 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 multibyte sequence are in the range 0x80 to
0xbf. This allows easy resynchronization 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 sequence 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-endian). Only the shortest possible multibyte sequence
which can represent 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
therefore 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 necessarily correspond any more to a single character.
Secondly, since modern terminal emulators in UTF-8 mode also
support Chinese, Japanese, and Korean double-width characters as
well as nonspacing combining characters, 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 requirement 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.
locale(1), nl_langinfo(3), setlocale(3), charsets(7), unicode(7)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.9.1.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2024-06-26. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
Linux man-pages 6.9.1 2024-06-15 UTF-8(7)
Pages that refer to this page: unicode_start(1), unicode_stop(1), locale(5), armscii-8(7), ascii(7), charsets(7), cp1251(7), cp1252(7), iso_8859-10(7), iso_8859-11(7), iso_8859-13(7), iso_8859-14(7), iso_8859-15(7), iso_8859-16(7), iso_8859-1(7), iso_8859-2(7), iso_8859-3(7), iso_8859-4(7), iso_8859-5(7), iso_8859-6(7), iso_8859-7(7), iso_8859-8(7), iso_8859-9(7), koi8-r(7), koi8-u(7), locale(7), man-pages(7), unicode(7), uri(7), setfont(8)
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HTML rendering created 2024-06-26 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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