UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8
UTF-8000 is a proposed, non-standard extension of the UTF-8 character encoding system designed to allow for arbitrarily large code units. The project is a standalone experiment and is not endorsed by the Unicode Consortium.
Why it matters
It serves as a technical exploration of character encoding limits and the mechanics of self-synchronizing bitstreams in computer science.
Unlimited UTF-8! ASCII ⊆ UTF-8 ⊆ UTF-8000.
No special cases introduced. All properties preserved.
Try out the reference implementation with $ pipx install UTF-8000 .
UTF-8000 is in no way endorsed by or representative of the Unicode Consortium . This is a fun standalone project / proposal.
There is nothing special-case-y about the example 22-byte code unit here. It is just a good prototypical example, demonstrating the power of UTF-8000 with multiple start bytes.
There are only two special cases, both of which are inherited from UTF-8: ASCII as is, and 2-byte UTF-8 having 4 mandatory content bits to check against overlong encoding as opposed to 5 for all longer length code units.
Here is anatomical diagram of the example 22-byte code unit from the tldr .
See the glossary for more information on the definitions of the terms.
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