Editing UTF-16 (section)

== Size ==
A "character" may use any number of Unicode code points.<ref name="extended grapheme">{{Cite web|title=It's not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7|url=https://hsivonen.fi/string-length/|access-date=2021-03-15|website=hsivonen.fi}}</ref> For instance an [[regional indicator symbol|emoji flag character]] takes 8 bytes, since it is "constructed from a pair of Unicode scalar values"<ref>{{Cite web|title=Apple Developer Documentation|url=https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/string|access-date=2021-03-15|website=developer.apple.com}}</ref> (and those values are outside the BMP and require 4 bytes each). UTF-16 in no way assists in "counting characters" or in "measuring the width of a string".

UTF-16 is often claimed to be more space-efficient than [[UTF-8]] for East Asian languages, since it uses two bytes for characters that take 3 bytes in UTF-8. Since real text contains many spaces, numbers, punctuation, markup (for e.g. web pages), and control characters, which take only one byte in UTF-8, this is only true for artificially constructed dense blocks of text.{{citation needed|date=November 2022}} A more serious claim can be made for [[Devanagari]] and [[Bengali language|Bengali]], which use multi-letter words and all the letters take 3 bytes in UTF-8 and only 2 in UTF-16.

In addition the Chinese Unicode encoding standard [[GB 18030]] always produces files the same size or smaller than UTF-16 for all languages, not just for Chinese (it does this by sacrificing self-synchronization).