What is Variable-width encoding?
A '''variable-width encoding''' is a type of [[character encoding]] scheme in which codes of different lengths are used to encode a [[character set]] for representation in a [[computer]]. All of the common [[Unicode]] encodings are variable-width encodings, e.g. [[UTF-8]] and [[UTF-16]]. It's a common mistake to think that UTF-16 isn't, so that's not a good reason to prefer UTF-16 (only its obsolete predecessor UCS-2 is fixed-width). [[ASCII]] is a fixed-width encoding. So are many other legacy encodings, but no modern text encoding. Note, ASCII is legal UTF-8 text, but it's only fixed-width in that sense only when that subset is used. As soon as text uses even one letter outside of the ASCII subset, or even if software expects UTF-8 text, and can't rely on only the ASCII subset used, then the (UTF-8) encoding used is variable-length. {{tech-stub}} [[Category:Computer science]] [[Category:Encodings]]