UTF-8 does not encode "European glyphs" in two bytes, no. Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet, meaning most glyphs in European languages use the 1-byte ASCII subset of UTF-8. The occasional non-ASCII glyph becomes two bytes, that's correct, but that's a much smaller bloat than what you imply.

Anyway, what are you comparing it to, what is your preferred alternative? Do you prefer using code pages so that the bytes in a file have no meaning unless you also supply code page information and you can't mix languages in a text file? Or do you prefer using UTF-16, where all of ASCII is 2 bytes per character but you get a marginal benefit for Han texts?

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thaumasiotes 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Do you prefer using code pages so that the bytes in a file have no meaning unless you also supply code page information?

Yes. Note that this is already how Unicode is supposed to work. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark .

A file isn't meaningful unless you know how to interpret it; that will always be true. Assuming that all files must be in a preexisting format defeats the purpose of having file formats.

> Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet

If you want to interpret "variations of Latin" really, really loosely, that's true.

Cyrillic and Greek characters get two bytes, even when they are by definition identical to ASCII characters. This bloat is actually worse than the bloat you get by using UTF-8 for Japanese; Cyrillic and Greek will easily fit into one byte.

	▲	harmonics 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As someone who has been using Cyrillic writing all my life, I've never noticed this bloat you're speaking of, honestly... Maybe if you're one of those AI behemots who works with exabytes of training data, it would make some sense to compress it down by less than 50% (since we're using lots of Latin terms and acronyms and punctuation marks which all fit in one byte in UTF-8). On the web and in other kinds of daily text processing, one poorly compressed image or one JavaScript-heavy webshite obliterates all "savings" you would have had in that week by encoding text in something more efficient. It's the same with databases. I've never seen anyone pick anything other than UTF-8 in the last 10 years at least, even though 99% of what we store there is in Cyrillic. I sometimes run into old databases, which are usually Oracle, that were set up in the 90s and never really upgraded. The data is in some weird encoding that you haven't heard of for decades, and it's always a pain to integrate with them. I remember the days of codepages. Seeing broken text was the norm. Technically advanced users would quickly learn to guess the correct text encoding by the shapes of glyphs we would see when opening a file. Do not want.
	▲	mort96 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		UTF-8 does not require a byte order mark. The byte order mark is a technical necessity born from UTF-16 and a desire to store UTF-16 in a machine's native endianness. The byte order mark has has no relation to code pages. I don't think you know what you're talking about and I do not think further engagement with you is fruitful. Bye. EDIT: okay since you edited your comment to add the part about Greek and cryllic after I responded, I'll respond to that too. Notice how I did not say "all European languages". Norwegian, Swedish, French, Danish, Spanish, German, English, Polish, Italian, and many other European languages have writing systems where typical texts are "mostly ASCII with a few special symbols and diacritics here and there". Yes, Greek and cryllic are exceptions. That does not invalidate my point.