UTF8常识

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INTERNET STANDARD

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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22. Notational conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33. UTF-8 definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44. Syntax of UTF-8 Byte Sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55. Versions of the standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66. Byte order mark (BOM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88. MIME registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1010. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1011. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1112. Changes from RFC 2279 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1113. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Yergeau Standards Track [Page 1]

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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 200314. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1215. URI's . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1316. Intellectual Property Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1317. Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1318. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141. 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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 20033. 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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 2003

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 200313. 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

claims of rights made available for publication and any assurances of

licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to

obtain a general license or permission for the use of such

proprietary rights by implementors or users of this specification can

be obtained from the IETF Secretariat.

The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any

copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary

rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice

this standard. Please address the information to the IETF Executive

Director.

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: fyergeau@alis.com

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RFC 3629 UTF-8 November 200318. Full Copyright Statement

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

This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to

others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it

or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published

and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any

kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are

included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this

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Yergeau Standards Track [Page 14]