I’m just looking at the constructors for StreamReader / Writer and I note it uses UTF8 as default. Anyone know why this is? I would have presumed it would have been a safer bet to default to Unicode.
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I’m just looking at the constructors for StreamReader / Writer and I note it uses UTF8 as default. Anyone know why this is? I would have presumed it would have been a safer bet to default to Unicode.
UTF-8 will work with any ASCII document, and is typically more compact than UTF-16 – but it still covers the whole of Unicode. I’d say that UTF-8 is far more common than UTF-16. It’s also the default for XML (when there’s no BOM and no explicit encoding specified).
Why do you think it would be better to default to UTF-16? (That’s what
Encoding.Unicodeis.)EDIT: I suspect you’re confused about exactly what UTF-8 can handle. This page describes it pretty clearly, including how any particular Unicode character is encoded. It’s a variable-width encoding, but it covers the whole of Unicode.