On 09Jun2013 02:00, =?utf-8?B?zp3Or866zr/PgiDOk866z4EzM866?= <nikos.gr...@gmail.com> wrote: | Steven wrote: | >> Since 1 byte can hold up to 256 chars, why not utf-8 use 1-byte for | >> values up to 256? | | >Because then how do you tell when you need one byte, and when you need | >two? If you read two bytes, and see 0x4C 0xFA, does that mean two | >characters, with ordinal values 0x4C and 0xFA, or one character with | >ordinal value 0x4CFA? | | I mean utf-8 could use 1 byte for storing the 1st 256 characters. I meant up to 256, not above 256.
Then it would not be UTF-8. UTF-8 will encode an Unicode codepoint. Your suggestion will not. I'd point out that if you did this, you'd be back in the same situation you just encountered with ASCII: the first above-255 value would raise a UnicodeEncodeError (an error which does not even exist at present:-) | >> UTF-8 and UTF-16 and UTF-32 | >> I though the number beside of UTF- was to declare how many bits the | >> character set was using to store a character into the hdd, no? | | >Not exactly, but close. UTF-32 is completely 32-bit (4 byte) values. | >UTF-16 mostly uses 16-bit values, but sometimes it combines two 16-bit | >values to make a surrogate pair. | | A surrogate pair is like itting for example Ctrl-A, which means is a combination character that consists of 2 different characters? | Is this what a surrogate is? a pari of 2 chars? Essentially. The combination represents a code point. | >UTF-8 uses 8-bit values, but sometimes | >it combines two, three or four of them to represent a single code-point. | | 'a' to be utf8 encoded needs 1 byte to be stored ? (since ordinal = 65) | 'α΄' to be utf8 encoded needs 2 bytes to be stored ? (since ordinal is > 127 ) | 'a chinese ideogramm' to be utf8 encoded needs 4 byte to be stored ? (since ordinal > 65000 ) | | The amount of bytes needed to store a character solely depends on the character's ordinal value in the Unicode table? Essentially. You can read up on the exact process in Wikipedia or the Unicode Standard. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> The most annoying thing about being without my files after our disc crash was discovering once again how widespread BLINK was on the web. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
