- A character encoding capable of encoding all valid code points of Unicode. The encoding is variable-length, as code points are encoded with one or two 16-bit code units. UTF-16 arose from an earlier fixed-width 16-bit encoding known as UCS-2 (for 2-byte Universal Character Set) once it became clear that more than 216 code points were needed. UTF-16 is used internally by systems such as Windows, Java, and JavaScript. It is also often used for plain-text as well as for word-processing data files on Windows. It is rarely used for files on macOS or Unix/Linux. It never gained popularity on the Web, where UTF-8 is dominant. ← Wikipedia
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