> Does anyone out there know the difference between UTF-2
> (Unicode std 1.0 I believe) and UTF-8? If you are aware of a
> program that converts files in UTF-8 to UTF-2 and vice versa,
> please let me know,
The Unicode Standard, Version 1.0, is represented in the
form known as UCS-2.
Published in the back of of The Unicode Standard, Version 1.1,
(Unicode Technical Report #4) was a transformation format
identified as FSS-UTF. That is what we now know as UTF-8.
UTF-1 was a transformation format published in the first
edition of ISO/IEC 10646, since supplanted by amendments which
have defined UTF-8 and UTF-16.
The Unicode Standard, Version 2.0, is represented in the form
known as UTF-16--which for all characters encoded so far is
identical to UCS-2.
UTF-2 is an erroneous term.
. . .
Maybe not. UTF-2 was the original name for UTF-8. As you
note, Ken, UTF-1 was a transformation format in the first
edition of ISO/IEC 10646. It quickly became clear that UTF-1
was not very useful, so an alternative was developed. I think
some of the people working on Plan 9 developed it, along with
Gary Miller of IBM and others. (But I'm getting old, so my
memory may be faulty.) Anyway, the alternative was called
UTF-2.
That name changed pretty quickly to FSS-UTF (File System
Safe UCS Transformation Format). The second name was a mouthful,
however, so it changed AGAIN to UTF-8.
Because few people remember UTF-2, it is possible that your
answer here is correct, and the original requestor (I don't
remember who asked this) meant to type UCS-2 but typed
UTF-2 instead. But if he really did mean UTF-2, the
question about converters between UTF-2 and UTF-8 becomes
relatively simple. These are supposed to be the same thing.
However, I believe some small changes have slipped into UTF-8
over time. In that case, these would be almost, but not quite,
identical.
Historically yours,
-- Sandra
-----------------------
Sandra Martin O'Donnell
odonnell@zk3.dec.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:38 EDT