Encoding.Unicode Property
Updated: January 2011
Gets an encoding for the UTF-16 format using the little endian byte order.
Assembly: mscorlib (in mscorlib.dll)
Property Value
Type: System.Text.EncodingAn encoding for the UTF-16 format using the little endian byte order.
For information about the encodings supported by the NET Framework and a discussion of which Unicode encoding to use, see Understanding Encodings and Using Unicode Encoding.
The UnicodeEncoding object that is returned by this property may not have the appropriate behavior for your application. It uses replacement fallback to replace each string that it cannot encode and each byte that it cannot decode with a question mark ("?") character. Instead, you can call the UnicodeEncoding.UnicodeEncoding(Boolean, Boolean, Boolean) constructor to instantiate a little-endian UnicodeEncoding object whose fallback is either an EncoderFallbackException or a DecoderFallbackException, as the following example illustrates.
The following example determines the number of bytes required to encode a character array, encodes the characters, and displays the resulting bytes.
using System; using System.Text; public class SamplesEncoding { public static void Main() { // The characters to encode: // Latin Small Letter Z (U+007A) // Latin Small Letter A (U+0061) // Combining Breve (U+0306) // Latin Small Letter AE With Acute (U+01FD) // Greek Small Letter Beta (U+03B2) // a high-surrogate value (U+D8FF) // a low-surrogate value (U+DCFF) char[] myChars = new char[] { 'z', 'a', '\u0306', '\u01FD', '\u03B2', '\uD8FF', '\uDCFF' }; // Get different encodings. Encoding u7 = Encoding.UTF7; Encoding u8 = Encoding.UTF8; Encoding u16LE = Encoding.Unicode; Encoding u16BE = Encoding.BigEndianUnicode; Encoding u32 = Encoding.UTF32; // Encode the entire array, and print out the counts and the resulting bytes. PrintCountsAndBytes( myChars, u7 ); PrintCountsAndBytes( myChars, u8 ); PrintCountsAndBytes( myChars, u16LE ); PrintCountsAndBytes( myChars, u16BE ); PrintCountsAndBytes( myChars, u32 ); } public static void PrintCountsAndBytes( char[] chars, Encoding enc ) { // Display the name of the encoding used. Console.Write( "{0,-30} :", enc.ToString() ); // Display the exact byte count. int iBC = enc.GetByteCount( chars ); Console.Write( " {0,-3}", iBC ); // Display the maximum byte count. int iMBC = enc.GetMaxByteCount( chars.Length ); Console.Write( " {0,-3} :", iMBC ); // Encode the array of chars. byte[] bytes = enc.GetBytes( chars ); // Display all the encoded bytes. PrintHexBytes( bytes ); } public static void PrintHexBytes( byte[] bytes ) { if (( bytes == null ) || ( bytes.Length == 0 )) Console.WriteLine( "<none>" ); else { for ( int i = 0; i < bytes.Length; i++ ) Console.Write( "{0:X2} ", bytes[i] ); Console.WriteLine(); } } } /* This code produces the following output. System.Text.UTF7Encoding : 18 23 :7A 61 2B 41 77 59 42 2F 51 4F 79 32 50 2F 63 2F 77 2D System.Text.UTF8Encoding : 12 24 :7A 61 CC 86 C7 BD CE B2 F1 8F B3 BF System.Text.UnicodeEncoding : 14 16 :7A 00 61 00 06 03 FD 01 B2 03 FF D8 FF DC System.Text.UnicodeEncoding : 14 16 :00 7A 00 61 03 06 01 FD 03 B2 D8 FF DC FF System.Text.UTF32Encoding : 24 32 :7A 00 00 00 61 00 00 00 06 03 00 00 FD 01 00 00 B2 03 00 00 FF FC 04 00 */
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The .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework do not support all versions of every platform. For a list of the supported versions, see .NET Framework System Requirements.