Multiple choice technology programming languages

Which of the following statements are true?

  1. UTF characters are all 8-bits.

  2. UTF characters are all 16-bits.

  3. UTF characters are all 24-bits.

  4. Unicode characters are all 16-bits.

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
D Correct answer
Explanation

Unicode originally defined characters as 16-bit values, covering the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are encoding schemes that use different bit widths (8, 16, 32 bits) per code unit. Modern Unicode has expanded beyond 16 bits for supplementary characters, but the 16-bit statement was true for early Unicode.

AI explanation

Unicode was originally designed as a fixed 16-bit character encoding, assigning every character a 16-bit code point (this is the classic exam-level understanding, even though modern Unicode has since expanded via surrogate pairs/UTF-32 for characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane). UTF-8, in contrast, is a variable-width encoding where characters can take anywhere from 8 to 32 bits depending on the character, so "all 8-bit" is wrong.