Is the ® symbol a 3-byte or 4-byte Unicode character? How can I tell?

unicode

Solution

A Unicode character as such does not have any length in bytes. It is the character encoding that matters. You know the length of a character in bytes in a specific encoding from the definition of the encoding.

For example, in the ISO-8859-1 (ISO Larin 1) encoding, which encodes just a small subset of Unicode, including “®”, every character is 1 byte long.

In the UTF-16 encoding, all characters are either 2 or 4 bytes long, and characters in the range U+0000...U+FFFF, such as “®”, are 2 bytes

In the UTF-32 encoding, all characters are 4 bytes long.

In the UTF-8 encoding, characters take 1 to 4 bytes. A simple way to check this out is to use the Fileformat.info Character search (though this is not normative information, just a nice quick reference). E.g., the page about U+00AE shows the character in some encodings, including 0xC2 0xAE (that is, 2 bytes) in UTF-8.

Problem

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