Validating UTF‐8 in less than one instruction per byte. (29th October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Keiser, John; Lemire, Daniel
• Is Part Of: Software, practice & experience. Volume 51:Number 5(2021)
• Page Start: 950
• Page End: 964
• Publication Date: 2020-10-29
• Subjects: character encoding -- text processing -- Unicode -- vectorization; Computer software -- Periodicals; Computer programming -- Periodicals; Computer programs -- Periodicals; 005.3
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.2920
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0644

Abstract

Abstract: The majority of text is stored in UTF‐8, which must be validated on ingestion. We present the lookup algorithm, which outperforms UTF‐8 validation routines used in many libraries and languages by more than 10 times using commonly available single‐instruction‐multiple‐data instructions. To ensure reproducibility, our work is freely available as open source software.