Represents a Unicode implementation of System.Text.Encoding. [Edit]

See Also: UnicodeEncoding Members

System.Object
     System.Text.Encoding
          System.Text.UnicodeEncoding

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComVisible(true)] public class UnicodeEncoding : Encoding

Thread Safety

All public static members of this type are safe for multithreaded operations. No instance members are guaranteed to be thread safe.

Remarks

System.Text.UnicodeEncoding encodes each Unicode character in UTF-16, i.e. as two consecutive bytes. Both little-endian and big-endian encodings are supported.

Note:

On little-endian platforms such as Intel machines, it is generally more efficient to store Unicode characters in little-endian. However, many other platforms can store Unicode characters in big-endian. Unicode files can be distinguished by the presence of the byte order mark (U+FEFF), which is written as either 0xfe 0xff or 0xff 0xfe.

This System.Text.Encoding implementation can detect a byte order mark automatically and switch byte orders, based on a parameter specified in the constructor.

ISO/IEC 10646 defines UCS-2 and UCS-4. UCS-4 is a four-byte (32-bit) encoding containing 231 code positions, divided into 128 groups of 256 planes. Each plane contains 216 code positions. UCS-2 is a two-byte (16-bit) encoding containing the 216 code positions of UCS-4 for which the upper two bytes are zero, known as Plane Zero or the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). For example, the code position for LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A in UCS-4 is 0x00000041 whereas in UCS-2 it is 0x0041.

ISO/IEC 10646 also defines UTF-16, which stands for "UCS Transformation Format for 16 Planes of Group 00". UTF-16 is a two byte encoding that uses an extension mechanism to represent 221 code positions. UTF-16 represents code positions in Plane Zero by its UCS-2 code value and code positions in Planes 1 through 16 by a pair of special code values, called surrogates. UTF-16 is equivalent to the Unicode Standard. For a detailed description of UTF-16 and surrogates, see "The Unicode Standard Version 3.0" Appendix C.

[Edit]

Requirements

Namespace: System.Text
Assembly: mscorlib (in mscorlib.dll)
Assembly Versions: 1.0.5000.0, 2.0.0.0