About UTF-16

US-ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit character encoding standard that uses codes 0-127 to represent English characters and control codes.

• 7-bit encoding (128 characters total)
• Includes uppercase and lowercase English letters
• Numbers 0-9 and common punctuation
• Control characters (0-31 and 127)

UTF-16 is a variable-width character encoding capable of encoding all Unicode characters using one or two 16-bit code units.

• Uses 2 or 4 bytes per character
• Commonly used internally by Windows, Java, and JavaScript
• Supports all Unicode characters
• Less efficient than UTF-8 for Western text

🔄 Why Convert Between These Encodings?

📝 Format Examples

Common Encoding Use Cases

• Web Development: UTF-8 is the standard for HTML5, JSON, and RESTful APIs
• Database Storage: UTF-8 (utf8mb4 in MySQL) for international text
• File Processing: Know the source encoding before converting
• Legacy Systems: Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1 still common in older applications
• Email: UTF-8 with proper MIME headers

💡 Best Practices

• Always use UTF-8 for new projects and web applications
• Declare charset explicitly in HTML meta tags
• Convert legacy data to UTF-8 when possible
• Test with international characters during development
• Understand encoding when working with external data

Quick Links

Common encoding table comparisons:

• UTF-8 to ASCII Table
• UTF-8 to Windows-1252
• Windows-1252 to ASCII
• UTF-16 to Windows-1252
• ISO-8859-1 to Windows-1252
• View All Encoding Tools