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Asked: 2026-06-05T00:32:22+00:00

How many bytes are required to store one character in: Microsoft’s implementation of the

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How many bytes are required to store one character in:

  • Microsoft’s implementation of the .NET framework, version 4
  • JavaScript, as implemented by Microsoft Internet Explorer 8?
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  1. Editorial Team

    Both .NET and JavaScript use UTF-16. UTF-16 is a so-called variable-length encoding which uses 16-bit code units to represent Unicode code points (which are 21 bits in length). Historically it came from UCS-2 when Unicode was still a 16-bit code (which was deemed insufficient later, thus the expansion to 21 bits).

    Since UTF-16 uses 16-bit code units the code itself is a 16-bit code, but to represent a character, you’ll have to look a bit closer to what you actually mean:

    1. Character in the Unicode sense means Unicode code point which is probably your intended meaning. Here are two cases:

      1. A code point in the range  U+0000 to  U+FFFF takes up two bytes, because it can be represented in a single UTF-16 code unit (here code unit and code point are identical).
      2. A code point in the range U+10000 to U+10FFFF takes up four bytes because it has to be represented using two UTF-16 code units.

    2. Character in the usual meaning often refers to graphemes, actually, which would be what we perceive as a single character. Those can have arbitrarily many diacritics, or may be ligatures that are formed out of multiple code points by the rendering engine. Long story short in this case: Those can be arbitrarily long since they can consist of several code points.

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