In Windows Vista, each Unicode character is encoded using UTF-16 (where

UTF is an acronym for

Unicode Transformation Format). UTF-16 encodes each character as 2 bytes (or 16 bits).

　　UTF-8 UTF-8 encodes some characters as 1 byte, some characters as 2 bytes, some characters as 3 bytes, and some characters as 4 bytes. Characters with a value below 0x0080 are compressed to 1 byte, which works very well for characters used in the United States. Characters between 0x0080 and 0x07FF are converted to 2 bytes, which works well for European and Middle Eastern languages. Characters of 0x0800 and above are converted to 3 bytes, which works well for East Asian languages. Finally, surrogate pairs are written out as 4 bytes. UTF-8 is an extremely popular encoding format, but it's less efficient than UTF-16 if you encode many characters with values of 0x0800 or above.