Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16, ASCII, ANSI

• "Unicode" isn't an encoding, although unfortunately, a lot of documentation imprecisely uses it to refer to whichever Unicode encoding that particular system uses by default. On Windows and Java, this often means UTF-16; in many other places, it means UTF-8. Properly, Unicode refers to the abstract character set itself, not to any particular encoding.
• UTF-16: 2 bytes per "code unit". This is the native format of strings in .NET, and generally in Windows and Java. Values outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) are encoded as surrogate pairs. (These are relatively rarely used - which is a good job, as very few developers get them right, I suspect. I very much doubt that I do.)
• UTF-8: Variable length encoding, 1-4 bytes per code point. ASCII values are encoded as ASCII using 1 byte.
• • UTF-8:
    • 1 byte: Standard ASCII
    • 2 bytes: Arabic, Hebrew, most European scripts (most notably excluding Georgian)
    • 3 bytes: BMP
    • 4 bytes: All Unicode characters
  • UTF-16:
    • 2 bytes: BMP
    • 4 bytes: All Unicode characters
• UTF-7: Usually used for mail encoding. Chances are if you think you need it and you're not doing mail, you're wrong. (That's just my experience of people posting in newsgroups etc - outside mail, it's really not widely used at all.)
• UTF-32: Fixed width encoding using 4 bytes per code point. This isn't very efficient, but makes life easier outside the BMP. I have a .NET Utf32String class as part of my MiscUtil library, should you ever want it. (It's not been very thoroughly tested, mind you.)
• ASCII: Single byte encoding only using the bottom 7 bits. (Unicode code points 0-127.) No accents etc.
• ANSI: There's no one fixed ANSI encoding - there are lots of them. Usually when people say "ANSI" they mean "the default locale/codepage for my system" which is obtained via Encoding.Default, and is often Windows-1252 but can be other locales.

Basic Multilingual Plane[edit]

A map of the Basic Multilingual Plane. Each numbered box represents 256 code points.

The first plane, plane 0, the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) contains characters for almost all modern languages, and a large number of symbols. A primary objective for the BMP is to support the unification of prior character sets as well as characters for writing. Most of the assigned code points in the BMP are used to encode Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) characters.

The High Surrogates (U+D800–U+DBFF) and Low Surrogate (U+DC00–U+DFFF) codes are reserved for encoding non-BMP characters in UTF-16 by using a pair of 16-bit codes: one High Surrogate and one Low Surrogate. A single surrogate code point will never be assigned a character.

65,472 of the 65,536 code points in this plane have been allocated to a Unicode block, leaving just 64 code points in unallocated ranges (48 code points at 0870..089F and 16 code points at 2FE0..2FEF).

Detailed About UTF-8/UTF-16:

• UTF-8: For the standard ASCII (0-127) characters, the UTF-8 codes are identical. This makes UTF-8 ideal if backwards compatibility is required with existing ASCII text. Other characters require anywhere from 2-4 bytes. This is done by reserving some bits in each of these bytes to indicate that it is part of a multi-byte character. In particular, the first bit of each byte is 1 to avoid clashing with the ASCII characters.
• UTF-16: For valid BMP characters, the UTF-16 representation is simply its code point. However, for non-BMP characters UTF-16 introduces surrogate pairs. In this case a combination of two two-byte portions map to a non-BMP character. These two-byte portions come from the BMP numeric range, but are guaranteed by the Unicode standard to be invalid as BMP characters. In addition, since UTF-16 has two bytes as its basic unit, it is affected by endianness. To compensate, a reserved byte order mark can be placed at the beginning of a data stream which indicates endianness. Thus, if you are reading UTF-16 input, and no endianness is specified, you must check for this.

Source: Starkoverflow