Mirela
Internationalization (i18n) involves designing software applications to be easily adaptable to different languages and regions without requiring engineering changes. In an earlier article, we discussed some key best practices for i18n, with character encoding and Unicode at the forefront. Due to its significance, we will now delve deeper into UTF-8, which has become the standard encoding for the web.
Understanding character encoding
Character encoding is a method of converting characters into a format that computers can store and transmit. Before Unicode, different regions and languages often used their own encoding schemes, such as ASCII, ISO 8859-1, and Shift JIS. These schemes were limited in scope, often unable to represent characters from other languages, leading to issues in text exchange and data interoperability.
Unicode and UTF-8
Unicode was created to provide a single, unified character set that includes every character from all writing systems, as well as a variety of symbols, punctuation, and control characters. UTF-8 is one of several encoding schemes that implement Unicode. Its name is derived from Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit and it’s a variable-width encoding, meaning it uses a different number of bytes (1 to 4) to represent each character, depending on its complexity.
The role of UTF-8 in i18n
The main advantage of UTF-8 is its ability to encode all possible characters in Unicode. What this means is that it can support virtually every written language in the world. Unlike older encoding systems that were limited to specific languages or regions, UTF-8 encompasses a vast array of characters, including those from complex writing systems such as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.
Then we have UTF-8’s backward compatibility with ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII, which uses a single byte to represent characters, is the foundation of text encoding in early computing systems. UTF-8 retains compatibility with ASCII by encoding its characters in one byte, identical to ASCII’s encoding. Thanks to this compatibility, existing ASCII-based systems and software can be easily integrated or upgraded to support UTF-8, minimizing the need for extensive re-engineering.
Furthermore, UTF-8 is highly efficient in terms of storage and transmission. For languages that use primarily Latin characters, such as English, it is as space-efficient as ASCII. For languages that require more complex characters, the variable-length encoding ensures that no more bytes are used than necessary. This proves beneficial for web applications and services, where reducing data size can lead to faster load times and lower bandwidth usage.
From a technical perspective, UTF-8’s design also simplifies text processing. Many string manipulation functions, such as searching and substring extraction, can be performed without modification because the encoding is self-synchronizing. Each byte within a multi-byte sequence is distinguishable, allowing software to identify character boundaries accurately. This feature reduces the risk of data corruption and ensures the integrity of textual data during processing and transmission.
UTF-8, indispensable in internationalization
To conclude, UTF-8’s comprehensive character coverage, backward compatibility with ASCII, storage efficiency, and technical robustness make it the ideal choice for global software development. By adopting UTF-8, you can create applications that can be localized in multiple languages. Character encodingwill surely remain a foundational element of effective internationalization and localization.