Network Working Group                                         F. Yergeau
Request for Comments: 3629                             Alis Technologies
STD: 63                                                    November 2003
Obsoletes: 2279
Category: Standards Track


             UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646

Status of this Memo

  This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
  Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
  improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
  Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
  and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

  ISO/IEC 10646-1 defines a large character set called the Universal
  Character Set (UCS) which encompasses most of the world's writing
  systems.  The originally proposed encodings of the UCS, however, were
  not compatible with many current applications and protocols, and this
  has led to the development of UTF-8, the object of this memo.  UTF-8
  has the characteristic of preserving the full US-ASCII range,
  providing compatibility with file systems, parsers and other software
  that rely on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other values.
  This memo obsoletes and replaces RFC 2279.

Table of Contents

  1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
  2.  Notational conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
  3.  UTF-8 definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
  4.  Syntax of UTF-8 Byte Sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
  5.  Versions of the standards  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
  6.  Byte order mark (BOM)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
  7.  Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
  8.  MIME registration  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
  9.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
  10. Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
  11. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
  12. Changes from RFC 2279  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
  13. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12



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  14. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
  15. URI's  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
  16. Intellectual Property Statement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
  17. Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
  18. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

1. Introduction

  ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO.10646] defines a large character set called the
  Universal Character Set (UCS), which encompasses most of the world's
  writing systems.  The same set of characters is defined by the
  Unicode standard [UNICODE], which further defines additional
  character properties and other application details of great interest
  to implementers.  Up to the present time, changes in Unicode and
  amendments and additions to ISO/IEC 10646 have tracked each other, so
  that the character repertoires and code point assignments have
  remained in sync.  The relevant standardization committees have
  committed to maintain this very useful synchronism.

  ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode define several encoding forms of their
  common repertoire: UTF-8, UCS-2, UTF-16, UCS-4 and UTF-32.  In an
  encoding form, each character is represented as one or more encoding
  units.  All standard UCS encoding forms except UTF-8 have an encoding
  unit larger than one octet, making them hard to use in many current
  applications and protocols that assume 8 or even 7 bit characters.

  UTF-8, the object of this memo, has a one-octet encoding unit.  It
  uses all bits of an octet, but has the quality of preserving the full
  US-ASCII [US-ASCII] range: US-ASCII characters are encoded in one
  octet having the normal US-ASCII value, and any octet with such a
  value can only stand for a US-ASCII character, and nothing else.

  UTF-8 encodes UCS characters as a varying number of octets, where the
  number of octets, and the value of each, depend on the integer value
  assigned to the character in ISO/IEC 10646 (the character number,
  a.k.a. code position, code point or Unicode scalar value).  This
  encoding form has the following characteristics (all values are in
  hexadecimal):

  o  Character numbers from U+0000 to U+007F (US-ASCII repertoire)
     correspond to octets 00 to 7F (7 bit US-ASCII values).  A direct
     consequence is that a plain ASCII string is also a valid UTF-8
     string.








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  o  US-ASCII octet values do not appear otherwise in a UTF-8 encoded
     character stream.  This provides compatibility with file systems
     or other software (e.g., the printf() function in C libraries)
     that parse based on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other
     values.

  o  Round-trip conversion is easy between UTF-8 and other encoding
     forms.

  o  The first octet of a multi-octet sequence indicates the number of
     octets in the sequence.

  o  The octet values C0, C1, F5 to FF never appear.

  o  Character boundaries are easily found from anywhere in an octet
     stream.

  o  The byte-value lexicographic sorting order of UTF-8 strings is the
     same as if ordered by character numbers.  Of course this is of
     limited interest since a sort order based on character numbers is
     almost never culturally valid.

  o  The Boyer-Moore fast search algorithm can be used with UTF-8 data.

  o  UTF-8 strings can be fairly reliably recognized as such by a
     simple algorithm, i.e., the probability that a string of
     characters in any other encoding appears as valid UTF-8 is low,
     diminishing with increasing string length.

  UTF-8 was devised in September 1992 by Ken Thompson, guided by design
  criteria specified by Rob Pike, with the objective of defining a UCS
  transformation format usable in the Plan9 operating system in a non-
  disruptive manner.  Thompson's design was stewarded through
  standardization by the X/Open Joint Internationalization Group XOJIG
  (see [FSS_UTF]), bearing the names FSS-UTF (variant FSS/UTF), UTF-2
  and finally UTF-8 along the way.

2.  Notational conventions

  The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
  "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
  document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

  UCS characters are designated by the U+HHHH notation, where HHHH is a
  string of from 4 to 6 hexadecimal digits representing the character
  number in ISO/IEC 10646.





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3.  UTF-8 definition

  UTF-8 is defined by the Unicode Standard [UNICODE].  Descriptions and
  formulae can also be found in Annex D of ISO/IEC 10646-1 [ISO.10646]

  In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16
  accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets.  The
  only octet of a "sequence" of one has the higher-order bit set to 0,
  the remaining 7 bits being used to encode the character number.  In a
  sequence of n octets, n>1, the initial octet has the n higher-order
  bits set to 1, followed by a bit set to 0.  The remaining bit(s) of
  that octet contain bits from the number of the character to be
  encoded.  The following octet(s) all have the higher-order bit set to
  1 and the following bit set to 0, leaving 6 bits in each to contain
  bits from the character to be encoded.

  The table below summarizes the format of these different octet types.
  The letter x indicates bits available for encoding bits of the
  character number.

  Char. number range  |        UTF-8 octet sequence
     (hexadecimal)    |              (binary)
  --------------------+---------------------------------------------
  0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx
  0000 0080-0000 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
  0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
  0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

  Encoding a character to UTF-8 proceeds as follows:

  1.  Determine the number of octets required from the character number
      and the first column of the table above.  It is important to note
      that the rows of the table are mutually exclusive, i.e., there is
      only one valid way to encode a given character.

  2.  Prepare the high-order bits of the octets as per the second
      column of the table.

  3.  Fill in the bits marked x from the bits of the character number,
      expressed in binary.  Start by putting the lowest-order bit of
      the character number in the lowest-order position of the last
      octet of the sequence, then put the next higher-order bit of the
      character number in the next higher-order position of that octet,
      etc.  When the x bits of the last octet are filled in, move on to
      the next to last octet, then to the preceding one, etc. until all
      x bits are filled in.





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  The definition of UTF-8 prohibits encoding character numbers between
  U+D800 and U+DFFF, which are reserved for use with the UTF-16
  encoding form (as surrogate pairs) and do not directly represent
  characters.  When encoding in UTF-8 from UTF-16 data, it is necessary
  to first decode the UTF-16 data to obtain character numbers, which
  are then encoded in UTF-8 as described above.  This contrasts with
  CESU-8 [CESU-8], which is a UTF-8-like encoding that is not meant for
  use on the Internet.  CESU-8 operates similarly to UTF-8 but encodes
  the UTF-16 code values (16-bit quantities) instead of the character
  number (code point).  This leads to different results for character
  numbers above 0xFFFF; the CESU-8 encoding of those characters is NOT
  valid UTF-8.

  Decoding a UTF-8 character proceeds as follows:

  1.  Initialize a binary number with all bits set to 0.  Up to 21 bits
      may be needed.

  2.  Determine which bits encode the character number from the number
      of octets in the sequence and the second column of the table
      above (the bits marked x).

  3.  Distribute the bits from the sequence to the binary number, first
      the lower-order bits from the last octet of the sequence and
      proceeding to the left until no x bits are left.  The binary
      number is now equal to the character number.

  Implementations of the decoding algorithm above MUST protect against
  decoding invalid sequences.  For instance, a naive implementation may
  decode the overlong UTF-8 sequence C0 80 into the character U+0000,
  or the surrogate pair ED A1 8C ED BE B4 into U+233B4.  Decoding
  invalid sequences may have security consequences or cause other
  problems.  See Security Considerations (Section 10) below.

4.  Syntax of UTF-8 Byte Sequences

  For the convenience of implementors using ABNF, a definition of UTF-8
  in ABNF syntax is given here.

  A UTF-8 string is a sequence of octets representing a sequence of UCS
  characters.  An octet sequence is valid UTF-8 only if it matches the
  following syntax, which is derived from the rules for encoding UTF-8
  and is expressed in the ABNF of [RFC2234].

  UTF8-octets = *( UTF8-char )
  UTF8-char   = UTF8-1 / UTF8-2 / UTF8-3 / UTF8-4
  UTF8-1      = %x00-7F
  UTF8-2      = %xC2-DF UTF8-tail



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  UTF8-3      = %xE0 %xA0-BF UTF8-tail / %xE1-EC 2( UTF8-tail ) /
                %xED %x80-9F UTF8-tail / %xEE-EF 2( UTF8-tail )
  UTF8-4      = %xF0 %x90-BF 2( UTF8-tail ) / %xF1-F3 3( UTF8-tail ) /
                %xF4 %x80-8F 2( UTF8-tail )
  UTF8-tail   = %x80-BF

  NOTE -- The authoritative definition of UTF-8 is in [UNICODE].  This
  grammar is believed to describe the same thing Unicode describes, but
  does not claim to be authoritative.  Implementors are urged to rely
  on the authoritative source, rather than on this ABNF.

5.  Versions of the standards

  ISO/IEC 10646 is updated from time to time by publication of
  amendments and additional parts; similarly, new versions of the
  Unicode standard are published over time.  Each new version obsoletes
  and replaces the previous one, but implementations, and more
  significantly data, are not updated instantly.

  In general, the changes amount to adding new characters, which does
  not pose particular problems with old data.  In 1996, Amendment 5 to
  the 1993 edition of ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode 2.0 moved and expanded
  the Korean Hangul block, thereby making any previous data containing
  Hangul characters invalid under the new version.  Unicode 2.0 has the
  same difference from Unicode 1.1.  The justification for allowing
  such an incompatible change was that there were no major
  implementations and no significant amounts of data containing Hangul.
  The incident has been dubbed the "Korean mess", and the relevant
  committees have pledged to never, ever again make such an
  incompatible change (see Unicode Consortium Policies [1]).

  New versions, and in particular any incompatible changes, have
  consequences regarding MIME charset labels, to be discussed in MIME
  registration (Section 8).

6.  Byte order mark (BOM)

  The UCS character U+FEFF "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE" is also known
  informally as "BYTE ORDER MARK" (abbreviated "BOM").  This character
  can be used as a genuine "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE" within text, but
  the BOM name hints at a second possible usage of the character:  to
  prepend a U+FEFF character to a stream of UCS characters as a
  "signature".  A receiver of such a serialized stream may then use the
  initial character as a hint that the stream consists of UCS
  characters and also to recognize which UCS encoding is involved and,
  with encodings having a multi-octet encoding unit, as a way to





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  recognize the serialization order of the octets.  UTF-8 having a
  single-octet encoding unit, this last function is useless and the BOM
  will always appear as the octet sequence EF BB BF.

  It is important to understand that the character U+FEFF appearing at
  any position other than the beginning of a stream MUST be interpreted
  with the semantics for the zero-width non-breaking space, and MUST
  NOT be interpreted as a signature.  When interpreted as a signature,
  the Unicode standard suggests than an initial U+FEFF character may be
  stripped before processing the text.  Such stripping is necessary in
  some cases (e.g., when concatenating two strings, because otherwise
  the resulting string may contain an unintended "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK
  SPACE" at the connection point), but might affect an external process
  at a different layer (such as a digital signature or a count of the
  characters) that is relying on the presence of all characters in the
  stream.  It is therefore RECOMMENDED to avoid stripping an initial
  U+FEFF interpreted as a signature without a good reason, to ignore it
  instead of stripping it when appropriate (such as for display) and to
  strip it only when really necessary.

  U+FEFF in the first position of a stream MAY be interpreted as a
  zero-width non-breaking space, and is not always a signature.  In an
  attempt at diminishing this uncertainty, Unicode 3.2 adds a new
  character, U+2060 "WORD JOINER", with exactly the same semantics and
  usage as U+FEFF except for the signature function, and strongly
  recommends its exclusive use for expressing word-joining semantics.
  Eventually, following this recommendation will make it all but
  certain that any initial U+FEFF is a signature, not an intended "ZERO
  WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE".

  In the meantime, the uncertainty unfortunately remains and may affect
  Internet protocols.  Protocol specifications MAY restrict usage of
  U+FEFF as a signature in order to reduce or eliminate the potential
  ill effects of this uncertainty.  In the interest of striking a
  balance between the advantages (reduction of uncertainty) and
  drawbacks (loss of the signature function) of such restrictions, it
  is useful to distinguish a few cases:

  o  A protocol SHOULD forbid use of U+FEFF as a signature for those
     textual protocol elements that the protocol mandates to be always
     UTF-8, the signature function being totally useless in those
     cases.

  o  A protocol SHOULD also forbid use of U+FEFF as a signature for
     those textual protocol elements for which the protocol provides
     character encoding identification mechanisms, when it is expected
     that implementations of the protocol will be in a position to
     always use the mechanisms properly.  This will be the case when



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     the protocol elements are maintained tightly under the control of
     the implementation from the time of their creation to the time of
     their (properly labeled) transmission.

  o  A protocol SHOULD NOT forbid use of U+FEFF as a signature for
     those textual protocol elements for which the protocol does not
     provide character encoding identification mechanisms, when a ban
     would be unenforceable, or when it is expected that
     implementations of the protocol will not be in a position to
     always use the mechanisms properly.  The latter two cases are
     likely to occur with larger protocol elements such as MIME
     entities, especially when implementations of the protocol will
     obtain such entities from file systems, from protocols that do not
     have encoding identification mechanisms for payloads (such as FTP)
     or from other protocols that do not guarantee proper
     identification of character encoding (such as HTTP).

  When a protocol forbids use of U+FEFF as a signature for a certain
  protocol element, then any initial U+FEFF in that protocol element
  MUST be interpreted as a "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE".  When a
  protocol does NOT forbid use of U+FEFF as a signature for a certain
  protocol element, then implementations SHOULD be prepared to handle a
  signature in that element and react appropriately: using the
  signature to identify the character encoding as necessary and
  stripping or ignoring the signature as appropriate.

7.  Examples

  The character sequence U+0041 U+2262 U+0391 U+002E "A<NOT IDENTICAL
  TO><ALPHA>." is encoded in UTF-8 as follows:

      --+--------+-----+--
      41 E2 89 A2 CE 91 2E
      --+--------+-----+--

  The character sequence U+D55C U+AD6D U+C5B4 (Korean "hangugeo",
  meaning "the Korean language") is encoded in UTF-8 as follows:

      --------+--------+--------
      ED 95 9C EA B5 AD EC 96 B4
      --------+--------+--------

  The character sequence U+65E5 U+672C U+8A9E (Japanese "nihongo",
  meaning "the Japanese language") is encoded in UTF-8 as follows:

      --------+--------+--------
      E6 97 A5 E6 9C AC E8 AA 9E
      --------+--------+--------



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  The character U+233B4 (a Chinese character meaning 'stump of tree'),
  prepended with a UTF-8 BOM, is encoded in UTF-8 as follows:

      --------+-----------
      EF BB BF F0 A3 8E B4
      --------+-----------

8.  MIME registration

  This memo serves as the basis for registration of the MIME charset
  parameter for UTF-8, according to [RFC2978].  The charset parameter
  value is "UTF-8".  This string labels media types containing text
  consisting of characters from the repertoire of ISO/IEC 10646
  including all amendments at least up to amendment 5 of the 1993
  edition (Korean block), encoded to a sequence of octets using the
  encoding scheme outlined above.  UTF-8 is suitable for use in MIME
  content types under the "text" top-level type.

  It is noteworthy that the label "UTF-8" does not contain a version
  identification, referring generically to ISO/IEC 10646.  This is
  intentional, the rationale being as follows:

  A MIME charset label is designed to give just the information needed
  to interpret a sequence of bytes received on the wire into a sequence
  of characters, nothing more (see [RFC2045], section 2.2).  As long as
  a character set standard does not change incompatibly, version
  numbers serve no purpose, because one gains nothing by learning from
  the tag that newly assigned characters may be received that one
  doesn't know about.  The tag itself doesn't teach anything about the
  new characters, which are going to be received anyway.

  Hence, as long as the standards evolve compatibly, the apparent
  advantage of having labels that identify the versions is only that,
  apparent.  But there is a disadvantage to such version-dependent
  labels: when an older application receives data accompanied by a
  newer, unknown label, it may fail to recognize the label and be
  completely unable to deal with the data, whereas a generic, known
  label would have triggered mostly correct processing of the data,
  which may well not contain any new characters.

  Now the "Korean mess" (ISO/IEC 10646 amendment 5) is an incompatible
  change, in principle contradicting the appropriateness of a version
  independent MIME charset label as described above.  But the
  compatibility problem can only appear with data containing Korean
  Hangul characters encoded according to Unicode 1.1 (or equivalently
  ISO/IEC 10646 before amendment 5), and there is arguably no such data
  to worry about, this being the very reason the incompatible change
  was deemed acceptable.



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  In practice, then, a version-independent label is warranted, provided
  the label is understood to refer to all versions after Amendment 5,
  and provided no incompatible change actually occurs.  Should
  incompatible changes occur in a later version of ISO/IEC 10646, the
  MIME charset label defined here will stay aligned with the previous
  version until and unless the IETF specifically decides otherwise.

9.  IANA Considerations

  The entry for UTF-8 in the IANA charset registry has been updated to
  point to this memo.

10.  Security Considerations

  Implementers of UTF-8 need to consider the security aspects of how
  they handle illegal UTF-8 sequences.  It is conceivable that in some
  circumstances an attacker would be able to exploit an incautious
  UTF-8 parser by sending it an octet sequence that is not permitted by
  the UTF-8 syntax.

  A particularly subtle form of this attack can be carried out against
  a parser which performs security-critical validity checks against the
  UTF-8 encoded form of its input, but interprets certain illegal octet
  sequences as characters.  For example, a parser might prohibit the
  NUL character when encoded as the single-octet sequence 00, but
  erroneously allow the illegal two-octet sequence C0 80 and interpret
  it as a NUL character.  Another example might be a parser which
  prohibits the octet sequence 2F 2E 2E 2F ("/../"), yet permits the
  illegal octet sequence 2F C0 AE 2E 2F.  This last exploit has
  actually been used in a widespread virus attacking Web servers in
  2001; thus, the security threat is very real.

  Another security issue occurs when encoding to UTF-8: the ISO/IEC
  10646 description of UTF-8 allows encoding character numbers up to
  U+7FFFFFFF, yielding sequences of up to 6 bytes.  There is therefore
  a risk of buffer overflow if the range of character numbers is not
  explicitly limited to U+10FFFF or if buffer sizing doesn't take into
  account the possibility of 5- and 6-byte sequences.

  Security may also be impacted by a characteristic of several
  character encodings, including UTF-8: the "same thing" (as far as a
  user can tell) can be represented by several distinct character
  sequences.  For instance, an e with acute accent can be represented
  by the precomposed U+00E9 E ACUTE character or by the canonically
  equivalent sequence U+0065 U+0301 (E + COMBINING ACUTE).  Even though
  UTF-8 provides a single byte sequence for each character sequence,
  the existence of multiple character sequences for "the same thing"
  may have security consequences whenever string matching, indexing,



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  searching, sorting, regular expression matching and selection are
  involved.  An example would be string matching of an identifier
  appearing in a credential and in access control list entries.  This
  issue is amenable to solutions based on Unicode Normalization Forms,
  see [UAX15].

11.  Acknowledgements

  The following have participated in the drafting and discussion of
  this memo: James E. Agenbroad, Harald Alvestrand, Andries Brouwer,
  Mark Davis, Martin J. Duerst, Patrick Faltstrom, Ned Freed, David
  Goldsmith, Tony Hansen, Edwin F. Hart, Paul Hoffman, David Hopwood,
  Simon Josefsson, Kent Karlsson, Dan Kohn, Markus Kuhn, Michael Kung,
  Alain LaBonte, Ira McDonald, Alexey Melnikov, MURATA Makoto, John
  Gardiner Myers, Chris Newman, Dan Oscarsson, Roozbeh Pournader,
  Murray Sargent, Markus Scherer, Keld Simonsen, Arnold Winkler,
  Kenneth Whistler and Misha Wolf.

12.  Changes from RFC 2279

  o  Restricted the range of characters to 0000-10FFFF (the UTF-16
     accessible range).

  o  Made Unicode the source of the normative definition of UTF-8,
     keeping ISO/IEC 10646 as the reference for characters.

  o  Straightened out terminology.  UTF-8 now described in terms of an
     encoding form of the character number.  UCS-2 and UCS-4 almost
     disappeared.

  o  Turned the note warning against decoding of invalid sequences into
     a normative MUST NOT.

  o  Added a new section about the UTF-8 BOM, with advice for
     protocols.

  o  Removed suggested UNICODE-1-1-UTF-8 MIME charset registration.

  o  Added an ABNF syntax for valid UTF-8 octet sequences

  o  Expanded Security Considerations section, in particular impact of
     Unicode normalization









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RFC 3629                         UTF-8                     November 2003


13.  Normative References

  [RFC2119]   Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

  [ISO.10646] International Organization for Standardization,
              "Information Technology - Universal Multiple-octet coded
              Character Set (UCS)", ISO/IEC Standard 10646,  comprised
              of ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000, "Information technology --
              Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) --
              Part 1: Architecture and Basic Multilingual Plane",
              ISO/IEC 10646-2:2001, "Information technology --
              Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) --
              Part 2:  Supplementary Planes" and ISO/IEC 10646-
              1:2000/Amd 1:2002, "Mathematical symbols and other
              characters".

  [UNICODE]   The Unicode Consortium, "The Unicode Standard -- Version
              4.0",  defined by The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0
              (Boston, MA, Addison-Wesley, 2003.  ISBN 0-321-18578-1),
              April 2003, <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/
              versions/enumeratedversions.html#Unicode_4_0_0>.

14.  Informative References

  [CESU-8]    Phipps, T., "Unicode Technical Report #26: Compatibility
              Encoding Scheme for UTF-16: 8-Bit (CESU-8)", UTR 26,
              April 2002,
              <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr26/>.

  [FSS_UTF]   X/Open Company Ltd., "X/Open Preliminary Specification --
              File System Safe UCS Transformation Format (FSS-UTF)",
              May 1993, <http://wwwold.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg20/docs/
              N193-FSS-UTF.pdf>.

  [RFC2045]   Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail
              Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message
              Bodies", RFC 2045, November 1996.

  [RFC2234]   Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
              Specifications: ABNF", RFC 2234, November 1997.

  [RFC2978]   Freed, N. and J. Postel, "IANA Charset Registration
              Procedures", BCP 19, RFC 2978, October 2000.







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RFC 3629                         UTF-8                     November 2003


  [UAX15]     Davis, M. and M. Duerst, "Unicode Standard Annex #15:
              Unicode Normalization Forms",  An integral part of The
              Unicode Standard, Version 4.0.0, April 2003, <http://
              www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15>.

  [US-ASCII]  American National Standards Institute, "Coded Character
              Set - 7-bit American Standard Code for Information
              Interchange", ANSI X3.4, 1986.

15.  URIs

  [1]  <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/policies.html>

16.  Intellectual Property Statement

  The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
  intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to
  pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in
  this document or the extent to which any license under such rights
  might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it
  has made any effort to identify any such rights.  Information on the
  IETF's procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and
  standards-related documentation can be found in BCP-11.  Copies of
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  The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any
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  rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice
  this standard.  Please address the information to the IETF Executive
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17.  Author's Address

  Francois Yergeau
  Alis Technologies
  100, boul. Alexis-Nihon, bureau 600
  Montreal, QC  H4M 2P2
  Canada

  Phone: +1 514 747 2547
  Fax:   +1 514 747 2561
  EMail: [email protected]





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18.  Full Copyright Statement

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003).  All Rights Reserved.

  This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
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  or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
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  kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
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  document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
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  The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
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Acknowledgement

  Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
  Internet Society.



















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