Character Encoding: Which Schemes Encode to Which Sizes?
By Daniel Miessler on February 26th, 2009: Tagged as Programming | Technology
The subject of character mapping and encoding is formidable, and many confuse the various schemes and standards available. As a reference, the list below gives the main encoding options and their associated output sizes.
- ASCII -> 7 bits
- “Extended ASCII” -> 8 bits
- UTF-7 -> 7 bits
- IBM (OEM) Code Maps -> 8 bits
- ANSI (Microsoft) Code Maps -> 8 bits
- ISO 8859 -> 8 bits
- UTF-8 -> 1-4 bytes
- UTF-16 -> 2-4 bytes
- UTF-32 -> 4 bytes
- UCS-2 -> 2 bytes (obsolete)
- UCS-4 -> 4 bytes