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

First of all, forget about UCS-2: it is obsolete. It contains only a subset of Unicode characters. Forget about UTF-32 too: it is very large and very redundant. It is not useful for data transmission.

In web pages, the most economical one is UTF-8 if most of the languages you handle are Western-like (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, etc.). But if bandwidth and loading times are not an issue, you could equally well use UTF-16. Just make sure that you always know which format the data is in when you handle a byte[]. And don’t try to convert to obsolete 8-bit character sets such as ISO-8859 or Windows-1252, because you will lose data if you do.

In C# code, your string objects will internally be in UTF-16, and there’s nothing you can do about that. So your normal string operations (e.g. Substring()) are unaffected by your choice of output format. One could argue that this makes it more performant to encode as UTF-16, but it’s not worth it if you’re going to transmit it across the Internet, where the cost of transmitting the larger UTF-16 outweighs the tiny processing gain.

In SQL Server, you should use nvarchar(...).