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Re: [xml-dev] Use of UTF-8 and UTF-16
Paul Spencer said:
> I see many XML-based interoperability projects that specify whether to use
> UTF-8 or UTF-16 for Unicode character encoding. One will usually result in
> smaller documents/messages that the other (broadly, UTF-8 is better if the
> character set is mainly ASCII, and UTF-16 is better otherwise).
For Western XML documents, UTF-8 files will in every case be smaller than
UTF-16, even for non-Latin scripts.
For CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) XML documents, where three (or six)
bytes may be used by UTF-8 instead of UCS-16's two (or four), UTF-16 files
will usually be smaller.
But filesize is not the only factor. There is of course a small cost in
converting from the internal encoding used by software and the
transmission encoding. And compression adds cost but equalizes filesize.
Rick Jelliffe
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