UTF-7
Sign in to saveAlso known as 7-bit Unicode Transformation Format
UTF-7 (7-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is an obsolete variable-length character encoding for representing Unicode text using a stream of ASCII characters. It was originally intended to provide a means of encoding Unicode text for use in Internet E-mail messages that was more efficient than the combination of UTF-8 with quoted-printable.
Key facts
- Character encoding.name
- UTF-7
- Character encoding.lang
- International <!-- Not
- Character encoding.extends
- ASCII as even plain ASCII text can be reinterpreted. -->
- Character encoding.encodes
- ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode)
- Character encoding.prev
- HZ-GB-2312
- Character encoding.next
- UTF-8 over 8BITMIME
- Character encoding.classification
- Unicode Transformation Format, ASCII armor, variable-width encoding, stateful encoding
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
Show 2 more facts
- Stack Exchange tag
- stackoverflow.com/tags/utf-7
- data size
- 7
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~9 min read
Article
10 sectionsContents
- Motivation
- Description
- Examples
- Algorithm for encoding and decoding
- Encoding
- Decoding
- Byte order mark
- Security
- See also
- References
UTF-7 (7-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is an obsolete variable-length character encoding for representing Unicode text using a stream of ASCII characters. It was originally intended to provide a means of encoding Unicode text for use in Internet E-mail messages that was more efficient than the combination of UTF-8 with quoted-printable.
UTF-7 (according to its RFC) isn't a "Unicode Transformation Format", as the definition can only encode code points in the BMP (the first 65536 Unicode code points, which does not include emojis and many other characters). However if a UTF-7 translator is to/from UTF-16 then it can (and probably does) encode each surrogate half as though it was a 16-bit code point, and thus can encode all code points. It is unclear if other UTF-7 software (such as translators to UTF-32 or UTF-8) support this.