

UTF-n: Brainstorming alternate text encodings - tr4nslator
http://jed.github.com/utfn/

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sern
Sure, UTF-8 sucks for Chinese and UTF-16 is bad at English, but in practice,
high-codepoint languages are rarely mixed with low-codepoint ones. Notice that
when sending an email many mail programs will select the most concise encoding
that happens to encompass every character in your message and usually not
UTF-8 or UTF-16.

~~~
briansmith
Counterexample: High-codepoint text in HTML or XML 1.0 vocabularies.

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randallsquared
Adding some Chinese (from wikipedia) does actually show UTF-n as worst-case
compared to UTF-16 and UTF-8, at least. I got UTF-16: 0%, UTF-8: 5%, and
UTF-n: 7%.

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blasdel
It would be good to have demo text that plays to UTF-n's advantage, so I don't
have to copy-paste from someplace like jp.wikipedia.org myself :)

It looks like it preserves some of UTF-8's stream synchronization properties,
but does it have UTF-8's wonderful property of being recognizable by simple
heuristics to great confidence even for tiny sequences?

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gritzko
For Russian, the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-n is statistically
insignificant.

