Which character encoding standard uses variable-width encoding (1 to 4 bytes per character) and is backward-compatible with 7-bit ASCII?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. UTF-8
- Step 1: Review global text encoding standards for international characters.
- Step 2: UTF-8 encodes Unicode code points using 1 to 4 one-byte code units. The first 128 characters (0â127) are identical to standard 7-bit ASCII, ensuring complete backward compatibility.
Answer
UTF-8.
Why not the others: UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes and is not backward-compatible with ASCII byte-streams; EBCDIC is an obsolete IBM standard; ISO-8859-1 is a fixed single-byte 8-bit standard with limited characters.
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