Several encoding methods

1. ASCII Code
The most widely used character set and its encoding in the current computer are ASCII codes developed by the United States National Standards Agency (ANSI) (American Standard Code for information interchange, US Standards Information Interchange Code), It has been established as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), known as ISO 646. Applies to all Latin letters, ASCII code has 7-bit code and 8-bit code two forms.

We know that inside the computer, all the information is ultimately represented as a binary string. Each bits (bit) has 0 and 12 states, so eight bits can combine 256 states, which is called a byte. In other words, a byte can be used to represent 256 different states, each of which corresponds to a symbol, which is 256 symbols, from 0000000 to 11111111.

The ASCII code specifies a total of 128 characters, such as a space "space" is 32 (binary 00100000), the uppercase letter A is 65 (binary 01000001). These 128 symbols (including 32 control symbols that cannot be printed out) take up only one byte of the latter 7 bits, and the first 1-bit uniform is 0.

Note: In the computer's storage unit, an ASCII value occupies one byte (8 bits) and its highest bit (B7) is used as the parity bit. The so-called parity check, refers to the code in the process used to verify whether there is a method of error, the general sub-parity check and parity two. Odd check rules: The correct code in one byte of the number of 1 must be odd, if not odd, the highest bit B7 Tim 1; Parity rule: The correct code in a byte of 1 must be an even number, if not even, the highest bit B7 add 1.

2 , non-ASCII encoding

It is enough to encode 128 symbols in English, but 128 symbols are not enough to represent other languages. For example, in French, where there is a phonetic symbol above the letter, it cannot be represented by an ASCII code. As a result, some European countries decided to use the highest bits of the bytes that were idle to incorporate new symbols. For example, the code for E in French is 130 (binary 10000010). In this way, the coding system used in these European countries can represent a maximum of 256 symbols.

However, there are new problems. Different countries have different letters, so even if they are encoded using 256 symbols, the letters are not the same. For example, 130 is represented in the French code, but in Hebrew it represents the letter Gimel (?), and in the Russian language, another symbol is represented in the code. But anyway, in all of these encodings, 0-127 represents the same symbol, and the difference is just 128-255 of this paragraph.

As for Asian countries, the use of symbols is more, the Chinese character is about 100,000. A byte can represent only 256 symbols, which is certainly not enough, and must be expressed using multiple bytes to express a symbol. For example, the common encoding method in Simplified Chinese is GB2312, which uses two bytes to represent a Chinese character, so it is theoretically possible to represent a maximum of 256x256=65536 symbols.

3. Problems with Unicode

As mentioned in the previous section, there are many coding methods in the world, and the same binary numbers can be interpreted as different symbols. Therefore, if you want to open a text file, you must know its encoding, or in the wrong way to interpret the code, there will be garbled. Why do e-mails often appear garbled? It is because the sender and the recipient are using different encoding methods.

It can be imagined that if there is a code, all the symbols in the world are included. Each symbol is given a unique encoding, then the garbled problem disappears. This is Unicode, as its name indicates, which is an encoding of all symbols.

Unicode is of course a large collection, and now the scale can accommodate the 100多万个 symbol. Each symbol is encoded differently, for example, u+0639 means that the Arabic letter ain,u+0041 represents the capital letter of the English a,u+4e25 denotes the Chinese character "strict". The specific Symbol correspondence table, may query unicode.org, or the specialized Chinese character correspondence table.

It is important to notice that Unicode is just a set of symbols that specifies only the binary code of the symbol, but does not specify how the binary code should be stored.

For example, the Chinese character "strict" Unicode is hexadecimal number 4E25, converted to a binary number is a full 15 bits (100111000100101), that is to say, the symbol of at least 2 bytes. Representing other larger symbols, it may take 3 bytes or 4 bytes, or more.

There are two serious problems here, and the first question is, how can you differentiate between Unicode and ASCII? How does the computer know that three bytes represents a symbol instead of three symbols? The second problem is that we already know that the English alphabet is only one byte to express enough, if Unicode uniform rules, each symbol with three or four bytes, then each English letter must have two to three bytes is 0, which is a huge waste for storage, the size of the text file will be two or three times times larger , it is unacceptable.

They result in: 1) There is a variety of Unicode storage methods, which means that there are many different binary formats that can be used to represent Unicode. 2) Unicode cannot be promoted for a long period of time until the advent of the Internet.

4, UTF-8

The popularization of the Internet has strongly demanded the emergence of a unified coding method. UTF-8 is the most widely used form of Unicode implementation on the Internet. Other implementations include UTF-16 and UTF-32, but they are largely unused on the Internet. Again and again, the relationship here is that UTF-8 is one of the ways Unicode is implemented.

One of the biggest features of UTF-8 is that it is a variable-length coding method. It can use 1~4 bytes to represent a symbol, varying the length of a byte depending on the symbol .

The coding rules for UTF-8 are simple, with only two lines:

1) for a single-byte symbol, the first bit of the byte is set to 0, and the next 7 bits are the Unicode code for the symbol. So for the English alphabet, the UTF-8 encoding and ASCII code are the same.

2) for n-byte notation (n>1), the first n bits are set to 1, the n+1 bit is set to 0, and the first two bits of the subsequent bytes are set to 10. The rest of the bits are not mentioned, all of which are Unicode codes for this symbol.

The following table summarizes the encoding rules, and the letter x represents the bits that are available for encoding.

Unicode Symbol Range | UTF-8 Encoding method
(hex) | (binary)
--------------------+---------------------------------------------
0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx ( Indicates the letter takes one byte)
0000 0000-0080 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx ( Note that Kanji accounts for two bytes)
0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

Below, or take the Chinese character "Yan" as an example, demonstrates how to implement UTF-8 encoding.

Known as "Strict" Unicode is 4E25 (100111000100101), according to the table above, you can find 4E25 in the range of the third row (0000 0800-0000 FFFF), so "strict" UTF-8 encoding requires three bytes, that is, the format is " 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx ". Then, starting from the last bits of "Yan", the X in the format is filled in sequentially, and the extra bits complement 0. This gets, "strict" UTF-8 code is "11100100 10111000 10100101", converted into 16 binary is e4b8a5.

5. Conversion between Unicode and UTF-8

Using the example in the previous section, you can see that the Unicode code for "strict" is 4e25,utf-8 encoding is E4B8A5, and the two are not the same. The transitions between them can be implemented by the program.

Under the Windows platform, one of the simplest ways to convert is to use the built-in Notepad applet Notepad.exe. After opening the file, click "Save as" on the "File" menu, you will get out of a dialog box, at the bottom there is a "coded" drop-down bar.

There are four options: Ansi,unicode,unicode big endian and UTF-8.

1) ANSI is the default encoding method. For English documents is ASCII encoding, for the Simplified Chinese file is GB2312 encoding (only for the Simplified Chinese version of Windows, if the traditional Chinese version will use BIG5 code).

2) Unicode encoding refers to the UCS-2 encoding method, which is a Unicode code that is stored directly in characters with two bytes. This option uses the little endian format.

3) The Unicode big endian encoding corresponds to the previous option. In the next section I will explain the meaning of little endian and big endian.

4) UTF-8 encoding, which is the encoding method mentioned in the previous section.

After selecting the "Encoding method", click on the "Save" button, the file encoding method quickly converted.

6, Little endian and big endian

As mentioned in the previous section, Unicode codes can be stored directly in the UCS-2 format. Take the Chinese character "Yan" for example, the Unicode code is 4E25, need to be stored in two bytes, one byte is 4E, the other byte is 25. Storage, 4E in front, 25 in the back, is the big endian way, 25 in front, 4E in the back, is little endian way.

The two quirky names come from the book of Gulliver's Travels by British writer Swift. In the book, the Civil War broke out in the small country, the cause of the war is people arguing, whether to eat eggs from the big Head (Big-endian) or from the head (Little-endian) knocked open. For this matter, the war broke out six times, one Emperor gave his life, and the other emperor lost his throne.

Therefore, the first byte in front, is the "Big endian", the second byte in front is the "small Head Way" (Little endian).

Then, naturally, there is a problem: How does the computer know which encoding to use for a particular file?

Defined in the Unicode specification, each file is preceded by a character that represents the encoding sequence, which is named "0-width non-newline space" (ZERO wide no-break space), denoted by Feff. This happens to be two bytes, and FF is 1 larger than FE.

If the first two bytes of a text file are FE FF, it means that the file is in a large head, and if the first two bytes are FF Fe, it means that the file is in a small way.

7. Ascii,unicode,utf-8 instances

Below, give an example.

Open Notepad program Notepad.exe, create a new text file, the content is a "strict" word, followed by Ansi,unicode,unicode big endian and UTF-8 encoding method to save.

Then, use the "hex feature" in the text editing software UltraEdit to see how the file is encoded internally.

1) ANSI: The encoding of the file is two bytes "D1 CF", which is the "strict" GB2312 coding, which also implies that GB2312 is stored in the big head way.

2) Unicode: Encoding is four bytes "ff fe 4E", where "FF fe" indicates a small head mode of storage, the true encoding is 4E25.

3) Unicode Big endian: The encoding is four bytes "Fe FF 4E 25", wherein "FE FF" indicates that the head is stored in the way.

4) UTF-8: The encoding is six bytes "EF BB bf E4 B8 A5", the first three bytes "EF BB bf" indicates that this is UTF-8 encoding, and after three "E4B8A5" is the specific code of "strict", its storage sequence is consistent with the encoding order.

8, gb2312,big5,gbk,gb18030

Characters must be encoded before they can be processed by the computer. The default encoding used by the computer is the internal code of the computer. Early computers used 7-bit ASCII encoding, and in order to deal with Chinese characters, programmers designed GB2312 for Simplified Chinese and big5 for traditional Chinese.

GB2312 (1980) contains a total of 7,445 characters, including 6,763 Kanji and 682 other symbols. The inner code range of the Chinese character area is high byte from B0-f7, low byte from A1-fe, occupy code bit is 72*94=6768. 5 of these seats are d7fa-d7fe.

GB2312 supports too few Chinese characters. The 1995 Chinese character extension specification GBK1.0 contains 21,886 symbols, which are divided into Chinese characters and graphic symbol areas. The Chinese character area consists of 21,003 characters.

From ASCII, GB2312 to GBK, these encoding methods are backwards compatible, meaning that the same character always has the same encoding in these scenarios, and the latter standard supports more characters. In these codes, English and Chinese can be handled in a unified manner. The method of distinguishing Chinese encoding is that the highest bit of high byte is not 0. According to the programmer, GB2312 and GBK belong to the double-byte character set (DBCS).

The 2000 GB18030 is the official national standard for replacing GBK1.0. The standard contains 27,484 Chinese characters, as well as Tibetan, Mongolian, Uyghur and other major minority characters. From the words of Chinese characters, GB18030 added 6,582 characters (Unicode code 0X3400-0X4DB5) of CJK Extension A on the basis of the 20,902 characters of GB13000.1, which included 27,484 Chinese characters altogether.

CJK is what China and Japan and South Korea mean. Unicode in order to save code, the language of CJK three languages Unified Code. GB13000.1 is the Chinese version of ISO/IEC 10646-1, equivalent to Unicode 1.1.

The GB18030 encoding is in single-byte, double-byte, and 4-byte scenarios. Where single-byte, double-byte, and GBK are fully compatible. The 4-byte coded code bit is the 6,582 Chinese characters that are included in CJK Extension A. For example: The 0x3400 of UCS in GB18030 should be 8139ef30,ucs 0x3401 encoding in GB18030 should be 8139ef31.

Microsoft has provided a GB18030 upgrade package, but this upgrade package only provides a new set of 6,582 Chinese characters that support CJK Extension A: The new Arial-18030, does not change the inner code. The internal code of Windows is still GBK.

That means Big5 supports traditional Chinese, GB2312 supports Simplified Chinese, big5,gb2312 is a subset of GBK, GBK is a subset of GB18030

9, the use of UTF-8 and GBK choice

GBK is China's national code, the versatility is worse than UTF8, but UTF8 occupies more space than GBK.

UTF8 is an international code, its versatility is better, foreigners can also browse the forum, and Chinese can be directly recognized, if your forum to do more internationalization that must be used UTF8.

Several encoding methods