utf8(5)

utf85

Utf-8, a transformation format of iso 10646

Usage

ENCODING "UTF-8"

Overview

The UTF-8 encoding represents UCS-4 characters as a sequence of octets, using between 1 and 6 for each character. It is backwards compatible with ASCII, so 0x00-0x7f refer to the ASCII character set. The multibyte encoding of non-ASCII characters consist entirely of bytes whose high order bit is set. The actual encoding is represented by the following table:

[0x00000000 - 0x0000007f] [00000000.0bbbbbbb] -> 0bbbbbbb
[0x00000080 - 0x000007ff] [00000bbb.bbbbbbbb] -> 110bbbbb, 10bbbbbb
[0x00000800 - 0x0000ffff] [bbbbbbbb.bbbbbbbb] ->
	1110bbbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb
[0x00010000 - 0x001fffff] [00000000.000bbbbb.bbbbbbbb.bbbbbbbb] ->
	11110bbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb
[0x00200000 - 0x03ffffff] [000000bb.bbbbbbbb.bbbbbbbb.bbbbbbbb] ->
	111110bb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb
[0x04000000 - 0x7fffffff] [0bbbbbbb.bbbbbbbb.bbbbbbbb.bbbbbbbb] ->
	1111110b, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb, 10bbbbbb

If more than a single representation of a value exists (for example, 0x00; 0xC0 0x80; 0xE0 0x80 0x80) the shortest representation is always used. Longer ones are detected as an error as they pose a potential security risk, and destroy the 1:1 character:octet sequence mapping.

Releases

145 releases since Mac OS X 10.3; the text changed 2 times.

  1. 10.3–10.3.9
  2. 10.4–10.6.8
  3. 10.7–26.5

Standards

The utf8 encoding is compatible with RFC 2279 and Unicode 3.2.

From Libc 1752.120.2 in macOS 26.5. Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.