What issues would come from treating UTF-16 as a fixed 16-bit encoding?

Question

I was reading a few questions on SO about Unicode and there were some comments I didn't fully understand, like this one:

Dean Harding: UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding, which is more complex to process than a fixed-length encoding. Also, see my comments on Gumbo's answer: basically, combining characters exist in all encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16 & UTF-32) and they require special handling. You can use the same special handling that you use for combining characters to also handle surrogate pairs in UTF-16, so for the most part you can ignore surrogates and treat UTF-16 just like a fixed encoding.

I've a little confused by the last part ("for the most part"). If UTF-16 is treated as fixed 16-bit encoding, what issues could this cause? What are the chances that there are characters outside of the BMP? If there are, what issues could this cause if you'd assumed two-byte characters?

I read the Wikipedia info on Surrogates but it didn't really make things any clearer to me!

Edit: I guess what I really mean is "Why would anyone suggest treating UTF-16 as fixed encoding when it seems bogus?"

Edit2:

I found another comment in "Is there any reason to prefer UTF-16 over UTF-8?" which I think explains this a little better:

Andrew Russell: For performance: UTF-8 is much harder to decode than UTF-16. In UTF-16 characters are either a Basic Multilingual Plane character (2 bytes) or a Surrogate Pair (4 bytes). UTF-8 characters can be anywhere between 1 and 4 bytes

This suggests the point being made was that UTF-16 would not have any three-byte characters, so by assuming 16bits, you wouldn't "totally screw up" by ending up one-byte off. But I'm still not convinced this is any different to assuming UTF-8 is single-byte characters!

Answer 1

UTF-16 includes all "base plane" characters. The BMP covers most of the current writing systems, and includes many older characters that one can practically encounter. Take a look at them and decide whether you really are going to encounter any characters from the extended planes: cuneiform, alchemical symbols, etc. Few people will really miss them.

If you still encounter characters that require extended planes, these are encoded by two code points (surrogates), and you'll see two empty squares or question marks instead of such a non-character. UTF is self-synchronizing, so a part of a surrogate character never looks like a legitimate character. This allows things like string searches to work even if surrogates are present and you don't handle them.

Thus issues arising from treating UTF-16 as effectively USC-2 are minimal, aside from the fact that you don't handle the extended characters.

EDIT: Unicode uses 'combining marks' that render at the space of previous character, like accents, tilde, circumflex, etc. Sometimes a combination of a diacritic mark with a letter can be represented as a distinct code point, e.g. á can be represented as a single \u00e1 instead of a plain 'a' + accent which are \u0061\u0301. Still you can't represent unusual combinations like z̃ as one code point. This makes search and splitting algorithms a bit more complex. If you somehow make your string data uniform (e.g. only using plain letters and combining marks), search and splitting become simple again, but anyway you lose the 'one position is one character' property. A symmetrical problem happens if you're seriously into typesetting and want to explicitly store ligatures like fi or ffl where one code point corresponds to 2 or 3 characters. This is not a UTF issue, it's an issue of Unicode in general, AFAICT.

Answer 2

It is important to understand that even UTF-32 is fixed-length when it comes to code points, not characters. There are many characters that are composed from multiple code points, and therefore you can't really have a Unicode encoding where one number (code unit) corresponds to one character (as perceived by users).

To answer your question - the most obvious issue with treating UTF-16 as fixed-length encoding form would be to break a string in a middle of a surrogate pair so you get two invalid code points. It all really depends what you are doing with the text.