The use of 1 byte to represent 1 character is, however, an accident of history, caused by the fact that computer development started in Europe and the U.S. where 96 characters were found to be sufficient for a long time. Every character is represented as two bytes. This encoding can only represent the first 65536 Unicode characters. This is an extension of UCS-2 which can represent 1114112 Unicode characters. The first 65536 Unicode characters are represented as two bytes, the other ones as four bytes.
Every character is represented as four bytes.
This has an influence on disk storage space and network download speed. In the following, we will describe how to change your Linux system so it uses UTF-8 as text encoding. Network byte order is big endian.