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Variable-width encodings can be used in both byte strings and wide strings. String length and offsets are measured in bytes or wchar_t, not in "characters", which can be confusing to beginning programmers. UTF-8 and Shift JIS are often used in C byte strings, while UTF-16 is often used in C wide strings when wchar_t is 16 bits.
36 bits – size of word on Univac 1100-series computers and Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10 56 bits (7 bytes) – cipher strength of the DES encryption standard 2 6: 64 bits (8 bytes) – size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values – size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number
The length of a string can also be stored explicitly, for example by prefixing the string with the length as a byte value. This convention is used in many Pascal dialects; as a consequence, some people call such a string a Pascal string or P-string. Storing the string length as byte limits the maximum string length to 255.
[1] [a] Most common variable-width encodings are multibyte encodings (aka MBCS – multi-byte character set), which use varying numbers of bytes to encode different characters. (Some authors, notably in Microsoft documentation, use the term multibyte character set, which is a misnomer , because representation size is an attribute of the ...
Length-prefixed "short" Strings (up to 64 bytes), marker-terminated "long" Strings and (optional) back-references Arbitrary-length heterogenous arrays with end-marker Arbitrary-length key/value pairs with end-marker Structured Data eXchange Formats (SDXF) Big-endian signed 24-bit or 32-bit integer Big-endian IEEE double
The byte, 8 bits, 2 nibbles, is possibly the most commonly known and used base unit to describe data size. The word is a size that varies by and has a special importance for a particular hardware context. On modern hardware, a word is typically 2, 4 or 8 bytes, but the size varies dramatically on older hardware.
A group of eight bits is called one byte, but historically the size of the byte is not strictly defined. [2] Frequently, half, full, double and quadruple words consist of a number of bytes which is a low power of two. A string of four bits is usually a nibble.
The only popular alternative at that time, usually called a "Pascal string" (a more modern term is "length-prefixed"), used a leading byte to store the length of the string. This allows the string to contain NUL and made finding the length need only one memory access (O(1) (constant) time ), but limited string length to 255 characters.