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Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 77.61.180.106 (talk) at 17:22, 16 May 2021 (sources for Reuters + ‘Reuters is believed to use SCSU internally’ makes no sense as a thing to state: they'll use the same technology as everybody else; if an employee is consulting a web page most likely UTF-8, if sending mail maybe even ASCII and if they're running an SQL Server instance it'll use its mix of UTF16LE and SCSU + character encoding or not? the zig-zag + Czyborra's decompressor + MSDN page moved + why compress in the first place + source for general purpose compression). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode (SCSU)[1] is a Unicode Technical Standard for reducing the number of bytes needed to represent Unicode text, especially if that text uses mostly characters from one or a small number of per-language character blocks. It does so by dynamically mapping values in the range 128–255 to offsets within particular blocks of 128 characters. The initial conditions of the encoder mean that existing strings in ASCII and ISO-8859-1 that do not contain C0 control codes other than NULL TAB CR and LF can be treated as SCSU strings. Since most alphabets do reside in blocks of contiguous Unicode codepoints, texts that use small alphabets and either ASCII punctuation or punctuation that fits within the window for the main alphabet can be encoded at one byte per character (plus setup overhead, which for common languages is often only 1 byte), most other punctuation can be encoded at 2 bytes per symbol through non-locking shifts. SCSU can also switch to UTF-16 internally to handle non-alphabetic languages.

History & use

Reuters originally developed SCSU, then under the name RSCU for Reuters Compression Scheme for Unicode.[2][3][4][5]

At first the Unicode Consortium considered it to be a character encoding,[6] but in 1999 changed its mind: although it was still considered a transfer encoding syntax, for a while it was no longer considered a character encoding because different compressors might yield different outputs for the same text.[7] However, in 2004 this decision was reverted and now SCSU is considered a compressing character encoding scheme, as opposed to a simple or compound character encoding scheme.[8]

Roman Czyborra (of GNU Unifont) wrote a decompressor.[9]

Symbian OS, an operating system for mobile phones and other mobile devices, uses SCSU to serialize strings.

SQL Server 2008 R2 uses SCSU to compress Unicode values (there meaning from strings in UCS-2 encoding) stored in nchar(n) and nvarchar(n) columns, achieving space savings between 15% and 50% (while UTF-8 only has this 50% reduction for ASCII subset of Unicode), depending on the language of the data.[10]

Comparison with general-purpose plain text compression schemes

Because UTF-16 or UTF-8 text might occupy more space than its equivalent in pre-Unicode encodings did, one might want to use compression such as SCSU to mitigate this problem.[11] In comparison with general-purpose compressors, it is not necessarily advantageous to use SCSU.[5] Also, while it can be used as a text encoding, because of the stateful nature of the algorithm difficulties may arise when using it as an internal text representation since basic text operations become non-trivial.

Treated purely as a compression algorithm, SCSU is inferior to most commonly used general-purpose algorithms for texts of over a few kilobytes.

SCSU does have the advantage that it can usefully compress texts that are only a few characters long, whereas most full-scale compressors need hundreds of bytes of data to break even against their own overhead. In Symbian OS, SCSU is used even for Clipboard operations, e.g. Cut, Copy & Paste of small strings of text.

In HTML

Supporting SCSU in HTML documents is prohibited by the W3C[12][13] and WHATWG[14] HTML standards because HTML wasn't designed with non-ASCII-compatible encodings in mind. In the past, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities due to browsers' poor handling of such encodings have been demonstrated.[15]

See also

References

  1. ^ "UTS #6: Compression Scheme for Unicode". 2005-05-06. Retrieved 2008-06-13. SCSU defines a compact encoding, which is sometimes useful. However, Unicode text is much more commonly stored and transmitted in UTF-8 which is less compact (except for ASCII), much simpler, and does not present any security issues. For longer texts, general-purpose compression is effective and common.
  2. ^ https://unicode.org/iuc/iuc9/Friday2.html#b3
  3. ^ https://unicode.org/iuc/iuc10/program.html
  4. ^ https://unicode.org/reports/tr6-10.html
  5. ^ a b https://web.archive.org/web/20190508064108/ewellic.org/compression.html#scsu
  6. ^ https://unicode.org/reports/tr17/tr17-2.html
  7. ^ https://unicode.org/reports/tr17/tr17-3.html#Transfer Encoding Syntax
  8. ^ https://unicode.org/L2/L2004/04288-tr17-5d2.html#CharacterEncodingScheme
  9. ^ https://czyborra.com/scsu/scsu.c
  10. ^ "Unicode Compression Implementation (SQL Server 2008 R2 Books Online)". Retrieved 2008-08-18.
  11. ^ https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode3.0.0/ch05.pdf
  12. ^ "8.2.2.3. Character encodings". HTML 5.1 Standard. W3C.
  13. ^ "8.2.2.3. Character encodings". HTML 5 Standard. W3C.
  14. ^ "12.2.3.3 Character encodings". HTML Living Standard. WHATWG.
  15. ^ "<meta> - HTML". MDN Web Docs. Mozilla. Archived from the original on 3 October 2018.
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