Legacy Document

Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.

PATH Mac OS 8 and 9 Developer Documentation > Text Encoding Conversion Manager

Programming With the Text Encoding Conversion Manager

ISO/IEC 10646

The ISO/IEC 10646 standard defines two alternative forms of encoding:

a 32-bit encoding, which is the canonical form. The 32-bit form is referred to as UCS-4 (Universal Character Set containing 4 bytes)
a 16-bit form that is referred to as UCS-2

The ISO/IEC 10646 nomenclature refers to coded characters as multiples of octets, while the Unicode nomenclature refers to coded characters as indivisible 16-bit entities. The Unicode standard does not include the UCS-4 format.