What is the difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16?

UCS-2 is a character encoding scheme. It uses 2 bytes to encode a character, and this is equivalent to 16 bits. This means UCS-2 can be used to encode up to 216 characters. On the other hand, UTF-16 is also a character encoding scheme, but it can use 2 bytes or 4 bytes to represent a character. This means the maximum number of characters that can be represented will be higher in UTF-16 than in UCS-2. One of the major differences between the two is that UTF-16 is a newer scheme compare to UCS-2.

Another difference is that UTF-16 can be used to represent written characters that move from right to left. In contrast, UCS-2 does not support this. This means if you want to encode characters written in Hebrew or Arabic, UTF-16 will be a perfect choice. Another feature of UTF-16 that is lacking in UCS-2 is its ability to recognize two words that are similar in meaning but differ in spelling. A perfect example of this is words like 'do not' and don't.

UTF -16 and UTF-2 are two-character encoding sequences that utilize 2 bytes, which consists of 16bits to correspond to each character. The two and the 16 are suffixes. UCS-2 is fixed with the encoding that uses 2 bytes per character. This byte count means that it can signify up to a total of 216 characters, or slightly over 65 thousand. On the other hand, UTF-16 is variable with encoding sequences that use a modicum of 2 bytes and a upper limit of 4 bytes for each character.

This amount lets UTF-16 represents any character in Unicode while using minimal space for the most used characters. This space allows UTF-16 to exemplify any character in Unicode while using minimal space for the most used characters. The main difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16 is which one is being used today.