
<p>So far I've told you <em>three</em> ways of encoding Unicode. The traditional store-it-in-two-byte methods are called UCS-2 (because it has two bytes) or UTF-16 (because it has 16 bits), and you still have to figure out if it's high-endian UCS-2 or low-endian UCS-2. And there's the popular new UTF-8 <a href="http://www.zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC2279/Output/chapter2.html">standard</a> which has the nice property of also working respectably if you have the happy coincidence of English text and braindead programs 