Does "endian-ness" apply to UTF-8 characters that use multiple bytes?

Costello, Roger L. via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Mon Feb 4 13:21:01 CST 2019


Hello Unicode Experts!

As I understand it, endian-ness applies to multi-byte words.

Endian-ness does not apply to ASCII characters because each character is a single byte.

Endian-ness does apply to UTF-16BE (Big-Endian), UTF-16LE (Little-Endian), UTF-32BE and UTF32-LE because each character uses multiple bytes. 

Clearly endian-ness does not apply to single-byte UTF-8 characters. But what about UTF-8 characters that use multiple bytes, such as the character é, which uses two bytes C3 and A9; does endian-ness apply? For example, if a file is in Little Endian would the character é appear in a hex editor as A9 C3 whereas if the file is in Big Endian the character é would appear in a hex editor as C3 A9?

/Roger



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