Network Working Group F. Yergeau
Request for Comments: 3629 Alis Technologies
STD: 63 November 2003
Obsoletes: 2279
Category: Standards Track
UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
ISO/IEC 10646-1 defines a large character set called the Universal
Character Set (UCS) which encompasses most of the world's writing
systems. The originally proposed encodings of the UCS, however, were
not compatible with many current applications and protocols, and this
has led to the development of UTF-8, the object of this memo. UTF-8
has the characteristic of preserving the full US-ASCII range,
providing compatibility with file systems, parsers and other software
that rely on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other values.
This memo obsoletes and replaces RFC 2279.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Notational conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. UTF-8 definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Syntax of UTF-8 Byte Sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Versions of the standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Byte order mark (BOM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. MIME registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
11. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
12. Changes from RFC 2279 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
13. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003
14. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
15. URI's . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
16. Intellectual Property Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
17. Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
18. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1. Introduction
ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO.10646] defines a large character set called the
Universal Character Set (UCS), which encompasses most of the world's
writing systems. The same set of characters is defined by the
Unicode standard [UNICODE], which further defines additional
character properties and other application details of great interest
to implementers. Up to the present time, changes in Unicode and
amendments and additions to ISO/IEC 10646 have tracked each other, so
that the character repertoires and code point assignments have
remained in sync. The relevant standardization committees have
committed to maintain this very useful synchronism.
ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode define several encoding forms of their
common repertoire: UTF-8, UCS-2, UTF-16, UCS-4 and UTF-32. In an
encoding form, each character is represented as one or more encoding
units. All standard UCS encoding forms except UTF-8 have an encoding
unit larger than one octet, making them hard to use in many current
applications and protocols that assume 8 or even 7 bit characters.
UTF-8, the object of this memo, has a one-octet encoding unit. It
uses all bits of an octet, but has the quality of preserving the full
US-ASCII [US-ASCII] range: US-ASCII characters are encoded in one
octet having the normal US-ASCII value, and any octet with such a
value can only stand for a US-ASCII character, and nothing else.
UTF-8 encodes UCS characters as a varying number of octets, where the
number of octets, and the value of each, depend on the integer value
assigned to the character in ISO/IEC 10646 (the character number,
a.k.a. code position, code point or Unicode scalar value). This
encoding form has the following characteristics (all values are in
hexadecimal):
o Character numbers from U+0000 to U+007F (US-ASCII repertoire)
correspond to octets 00 to 7F (7 bit US-ASCII values). A direct
consequence is that a plain ASCII string is also a valid UTF-8
string.
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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003
o US-ASCII octet values do not appear otherwise in a UTF-8 encoded
character stream. This provides compatibility with file systems
or other software (e.g., the printf() function in C libraries)
that parse based on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other
values.
o Round-trip conversion is easy between UTF-8 and other encoding
forms.
o The first octet of a multi-octet sequence indicates the number of
octets in the sequence.
o The octet values C0, C1, F5 to FF never appear.
o Character boundaries are easily found from anywhere in an octet
stream.
o The byte-value lexicographic sorting order of UTF-8 strings is the
same as if ordered by character numbers. Of course this is of
limited interest since a sort order based on character numbers is
almost never culturally valid.
o The Boyer-Moore fast search algorithm can be used with UTF-8 data.
o UTF-8 strings can be fairly reliably recognized as such by a
simple algorithm, i.e., the probability that a string of
characters in any other encoding appears as valid UTF-8 is low,
diminishing with increasing string length.
UTF-8 was devised in September 1992 by Ken Thompson, guided by design
criteria specified by Rob Pike,
