UTF-16LE Encoding

This section provides a quick introduction of the UTF-16LE (Unicode Transformation Format - 16-bit Little Endian) encoding for Unicode character set. UTF-16LE is a variation of UTF-16.

UTF-16LE: A character encoding that maps code points of Unicode character set to a sequence of 2 bytes (16 bits). UTF-16LE stands for Unicode Transformation Format - 16-bit Little Endian.

Here is my understanding of the UTF-16LE specification. When UTF-16LE encoding is used to encode (serialize) Unicode characters into a byte stream for communication or storage, the resulting byte stream is identical to the Little-Endian with BOM Format of the UTF-16 encoding except that BOM is not prepended to the byte stream.

For example, these 3 Unicode characters, U+004D, U+0061 and U+10000 will be converted into 0x4D00610000D800DC when UTF-16LE is used.

When UTF-16LE encoding is used to decode (deserialize) a byte stream into Unicode characters, the entire stream will be divided into blocks of 2 bytes. Each block is converted to a 16-bit integer assuming the least significant byte first. Then process the converted integer stream as described below:

Note that the use of BOM (Byte Order Mark) is not part of the UTF-16LE specification. So you should:

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Character Sets and Encodings

 ASCII Character Set and Encoding

 GB2312 Character Set and Encoding

 GB18030 Character Set and Encoding

 JIS X0208 Character Set and Encodings

 Unicode Character Set

 UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8-Bit)

UTF-16, UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE Encodings

 What Are Paired Surrogates

 UTF-16 Encoding

 UTF-16BE Encoding

UTF-16LE Encoding

 UTF-32, UTF-32BE and UTF-32LE Encodings

 Python Language and Unicode Characters

 Java Language and Unicode Characters

 Character Encoding in Java

 Character Set Encoding Maps

 Encoding Conversion Programs for Encoded Text Files

 Using Notepad as a Unicode Text Editor

 Using Microsoft Word as a Unicode Text Editor

 Using Microsoft Excel as a Unicode Text Editor

 Unicode Fonts

 Archived Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB