Editing Wide character (section)

==Size of a wide character==
Early adoption of [[UCS-2]] ("Unicode 1.0") led to common use of [[UTF-16]] in a number of platforms, most notably [[Microsoft Windows]], [[.NET]] and [[Java (software platform)|Java]]. In these systems, it is common to have a "wide character" ({{code|wchar_t}} in C/C++; {{code|char}} in Java) type of 16-bits. These types do not always map directly to one "character", as [[surrogate pairs]] are required to store the full range of Unicode (1996, Unicode 2.0).<ref>{{cite web |url=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb688113.aspx |title=Globalization Step-by-Step: Unicode Enabled |website=msdn.microsoft.com |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090101025155/http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb688113.aspx |archive-date=2009-01-01}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=String Class (System) |url=https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.string?view=net-7.0 |website=learn.microsoft.com |language=en-us}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Primitive Data Types (The Java™ Tutorials > Learning the Java Language > Language Basics) |url=https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/datatypes.html |website=docs.oracle.com}}</ref>

[[Unix-like]] generally use a 32-bit {{code|wchar_t}} to fit the 21-bit Unicode code point, as C90 prescribed.<ref>{{cite web |title=Null-terminated wide strings <wctype.h> - cppreference.com |url=https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/wide |website=en.cppreference.com}}</ref>

The size of a wide character type does not dictate what kind of text encodings a system can process, as conversions are available. (Old conversion code commonly overlook surrogates, however.) The historical circumstances of their adoption does also decide what types of encoding they ''prefer''. A system influenced by Unicode 1.0, such as Windows, tends to mainly use "wide strings" made out of wide character units. Other systems such as the Unix-likes, however, tend to retain the 8-bit "narrow string" convention, using a multibyte encoding (almost universally UTF-8) to handle "wide" characters.<ref>{{cite web |title=UTF-8 Everywhere |url=http://utf8everywhere.org/ |quote=In the following years many systems have added support for Unicode and switched to the UCS-2 encoding. It was especially attractive for new technologies, such as the Qt framework (1992), Windows NT 3.1 (1993) and Java (1995).}}</ref>