is an efficient encoding of Unicode character - 
that recognizes the fact that the majority of text-based communications are in ASCII. It therefore optimizes the encoding of these characters.
Unicode is preferred to ASCII because it permits the inclusion of accents, scientific symbols and characters used in 
other than English. The format is a standard encoding that provides the most efficient means of encoding 16-bit Unicode characters in cases where the majority of characters are in the ASCII range. Both and the alternative 
encoding are supported by all widely used operating systems and major applications. UTF-8 was adopted is an IETF Internet Standard (it was initially adopted by IETF in 1996 to restrict some code values in 1998 and 2003). In 2008 UTF-8 became the most widely used for of encoding in web pages.
uses the
Note that SNOMED CT does not use, or require use of, the Byte Order Mark (BOM) specified by the Unicode standard because all SNOMED CT release files use UTF-8. |
of characters in 
and other text fields.
