Why is not Encoding.Unicode called Encoding.UTF16

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tony Johansson
  • Start date Start date
T

Tony Johansson

Hi!

Here I have some example of different encodings.
We for example UTF7 and UTF8.

But what seems strange is why not Encoding.Unicode is called UTF16 ?

StreamWriter swUtf7 = new StreamWriter("utf7.txt", false,
Encoding.UTF7);
swUtf7.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
swUtf7.Close();

StreamWriter swUtf8 = new StreamWriter("utf8.txt", false,
Encoding.UTF8);
swUtf8.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
swUtf8.Close();

StreamWriter swUtf16 = new StreamWriter("utf16.txt", false,
Encoding.Unicode);
swUtf16.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
swUtf16.Close();

StreamWriter swUtf32 = new StreamWriter("utf32.txt", false,
Encoding.UTF32);
swUtf32.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
swUtf32.Close();

//Tony
 
Here I have some example of different encodings.
We for example UTF7 and UTF8.

But what seems strange is why not Encoding.Unicode is called UTF16 ?
Click to expand...

That's just what Microsoft chose to call it, unfortunately. They probably
did so because that was the encoding they chose for storing strings
internally in .NET, so they considered it the "baseline" Unicode encoding.
 
But what seems strange is why not Encoding.Unicode is called UTF16 ?
Click to expand...

Bad decision by MS. It is very misleading.

But remember that .NET was not created without any history.

In Win32 API world there is a long history for using:

ANSI = single byte charset (ISO-8859-x or more specifically their
CodePage equivalents)

Unicode = UCS-2/UTF-16

It is confusing because ANSI is an american standardization organization
and Unicode is the codepoint tables.

But a lot of the people that worked creating .NET came from the
Win32 API world.

I believe this is something .NET inherited.

And no matter how much we dislike it, then Encoding.Unicode is
not likely to be removed ever, because it would break too much code.

What they could do was to:
- add Encoding.UTF16 with the same functionality
- mark Encoding.Unicode as deprecated

Arne
 
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