UTF-8 or UTF-16 or UTF-32 or UCS-2

Question

I am designing a new CMS but want to design it to fit all my future needs like Multilingual content so i was thinking Unicode (UTF-8) is the best solution

But with

Answer 1

This is a non-issue because you say:

i am using Asp.net and c# and SqlServer 2005

SqlServer uses UTF-16 in some places (ntext, nvarchar, nchar) and UTF-8 in a few XML-centric places, without you doing anything weird.

C# uses UTF-16 in all its strings, with tools to encode when it comes to dealing with streams and files that bring us onto...

ASP.NET uses UTF-8 by default, and it's hard to think of a time when it isn't a good choice (even with Asian languages, the textual concision of such languages combined with the fact that the names and symbols with special meaning in HTML, CSS, javascript, most XML applications and other streams you will be sending are from the range U+0000 to U+007F, makes the advantage of UTF-16 over UTF-8 in that range less significant than with plain text of Asian languages).

The talking between the UTF-16 of SqlServer and C# and the UTF-8 that ASP.NET does by in reading and writing, is done for you with default settings, but since this is the one bit you can readily change, my answer therefore would be to use UTF-8. Really you'll be using a mixture of -8 and -16, but you won't notice most of the time (have you noticed that you've already been doing so).

SQL Server is a bit less forgiving, if only because a lot of outdated examples have text expected for human consumption being put in varchar, text or char fields. Use these purely for codes (e.g. all ISO country codes are in the range of char(2), so nchar(2) would just waste space), and only nvarchar, ntext and nchar for things people rather than machines will read and write.