RFC 1642
Network Working Group D. Goldsmith
Request for Comments: 1642 M. Davis
Category: Experimental Taligent, Inc.
July 1994
UTF-7
A Mail-Safe Transformation Format of Unicode
Status of this Memo
This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any
kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
The Unicode Standard, version 1.1, and ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993(E)
jointly define a 16 bit character set (hereafter referred to as
Unicode) which encompasses most of the world's writing systems.
However, Internet mail (STD 11, RFC 822) currently supports only 7-
bit US ASCII as a character set. MIME (RFC 1521 and RFC 1522) extends
Internet mail to support different media types and character sets,
and thus could support Unicode in mail messages. MIME neither defines
Unicode as a permitted character set nor specifies how it would be
encoded, although it does provide for the registration of additional
character sets over time.
This document describes a new transformation format of Unicode that
contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and is intended to be readable
by humans in the limiting case that the document consists of
characters from the US-ASCII repertoire. It also specifies how this
transformation format is used in the context of RFC 1521, RFC 1522,
and the document "Using Unicode with MIME".
Motivation
Although other transformation formats of Unicode exist and could
conceivably be used in this context (most notably UTF-1 and UTF-8,
also known as UTF-2 or UTF-FSS), they suffer the disadvantage that
they use octets in the range decimal 128 through 255 to encode
Unicode characters outside the US-ASCII range. Thus, in the context
of mail, those octets must themselves be encoded. This requires
putting text through two successive encoding processes, and leads to
a significant expansion of characters outside the US-ASCII range,
putting non-English speakers at a disadvantage. For example, using
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
UTF-FSS together with the Quoted-Printable content transfer encoding
of MIME represents US-ASCII characters in one octet, but other
characters may require up to nine octets.
Overview
UTF-7 encodes Unicode characters as US-ASCII, together with shift
sequences to encode characters outside that range. For this purpose,
one of the characters in the US-ASCII repertoire is reserved for use
as a shift character.
Many mail gateways and systems cannot handle the entire US-ASCII
character set (those based on EBCDIC, for example), and so UTF-7
contains provisions for encoding characters within US-ASCII in a way
that all mail systems can accomodate.
UTF-7 should normally be used only in the context of 7 bit
transports, such as mail and news. In other contexts, straight
Unicode or UTF-8 is preferred.
See the document "Using Unicode with MIME" for the overall
specification on usage of Unicode transformation formats with MIME.
Definitions
First, the definition of Unicode:
The 16 bit character set Unicode is defined by "The Unicode
Standard, Version 1.1". This character set is identical with the
character repertoire and coding of the international standard
ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993(E); Coded Representation Form=UCS-2;
Subset=300; Implementation Level=3.
Note. Unicode 1.1 further specifies the use and interaction of
these character codes beyond the ISO standard. However, any valid
10646 BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) sequence is a valid Unicode
sequence, and vice versa; Unicode supplies interpretations of
sequences on which the ISO standard is silent as to
interpretation.
Next, some handy definitions of US-ASCII character subsets:
Set D (directly encoded characters) consists of the following
characters (derived from RFC 1521, Appendix B): the upper and
lower case letters A through Z and a through z, the 10 digits 0-9,
and the following nine special characters (note that "+" and "="
are omitted):
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
Character ASCII & Unicode Value (decimal)
' 39
( 40
) 41
, 44
- 45
. 46
/ 47
: 58
? 63
Set O (optional direct characters) consists of the following
characters (note that "\" and "~" are omitted):
Character ASCII & Unicode Value (decimal)
! 33
" 34
# 35
$ 36
% 37
& 38
* 42
; 59
< 60
= 61
> 62
@ 64
[ 91
] 93
^ 94
_ 95
` 96
{ 123
| 124
} 125
Rationale. The characters "\" and "~" are omitted because they are
often redefined in variants of ASCII.
Set B (Modified Base 64) is the set of characters in the Base64
alphabet defined in RFC 1521, excluding the pad character "="
(decimal value 61).
Rationale. The pad character = is excluded because UTF-7 is designed
for use within header fields as set forth in RFC 1522. Since the only
readable encoding in RFC 1522 is "Q" (based on RFC 1521's Quoted-
Printable), the "=" character is not available for use (without a lot
of escape sequences). This was very unfortunate but unavoidable. The
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
"=" character could otherwise have been used as the UTF-7 escape
character as well (rather than using "+").
Note that all characters in US-ASCII have the same value in Unicode
when zero-extended to 16 bits.
UTF-7 Definition
A UTF-7 stream represents 16-bit Unicode characters in 7-bit US-ASCII
as follows:
Rule 1: (direct encoding) Unicode characters in set D above may be
encoded directly as their ASCII equivalents. Unicode characters in
Set O may optionally be encoded directly as their ASCII
equivalents, bearing in mind that many of these characters are
illegal in header fields, or may not pass correctly through some
mail gateways.
Rule 2: (Unicode shifted encoding) Any Unicode character sequence
may be encoded using a sequence of characters in set B, when
preceded by the shift character "+" (US-ASCII character value
decimal 43). The "+" signals that subsequent octets are to be
interpreted as elements of the Modified Base64 alphabet until a
character not in that alphabet is encountered. Such characters
include control characters such as carriage returns and line
feeds; thus, a Unicode shifted sequence always terminates at the
end of a line. As a special case, if the sequence terminates with
the character "-" (US-ASCII decimal 45) then that character is
absorbed; other terminating characters are not absorbed and are
processed normally.
Rationale. A terminating character is necessary for cases where
the next character after the Modified Base64 sequence is part of
character set B. It can also enhance readability by delimiting
encoded sequences.
Also as a special case, the sequence "+-" may be used to encode
the character "+". A "+" character followed immediately by any
character other than members of set B or "-" is an ill-formed
sequence.
Unicode is encoded using Modified Base64 by first converting
Unicode 16-bit quantities to an octet stream (with the most
significant octet first). Text with an odd number of octets is
ill-formed.
Rationale. ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993(E) specifies that when characters
in the UCS-2 form are serialized as octets, that the most
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
significant octet appear first. This is also in keeping with
common network practice of choosing a canonical format for
transmission.
Next, the octet stream is encoded by applying the Base64 content
transfer encoding algorithm as defined in RFC 1521, modified to
omit the "=" pad character. Instead, when encoding, zero bits are
added to pad to a Base64 character boundary. When decoding, any
bits at the end of the Modified Base64 sequence that do not
constitute a complete 16-bit Unicode character are discarded. If
such discarded bits are non-zero the sequence is ill-formed.
Rationale. The pad character "=" is not used when encoding
Modified Base64 because of the conflict with its use as an escape
character for the Q content transfer encoding in RFC 1522 header
fields, as mentioned above.
Rule 3: The space (decimal 32), tab (decimal 9), carriage return
(decimal 13), and line feed (decimal 10) characters may be
directly represented by their ASCII equivalents. However, note
that MIME content transfer encodings have rules concerning the use
of such characters. Usage that does not conform to the
restrictions of RFC 822, for example, would have to be encoded
using MIME content transfer encodings other than 7bit or 8bit,
such as quoted-printable, binary, or base64.
Given this set of rules, Unicode characters which may be encoded via
rules 1 or 3 take one octet per character, and other Unicode
characters are encoded on average with 2 2/3 octets per character
plus one octet to switch into Modified Base64 and an optional octet
to switch out.
Example. The Unicode sequence "A."
(hexadecimal 0041,2262,0391,002E) may be encoded as follows:
A+ImIDkQ.
Example. The Unicode sequence "Hi Mom !"
(hexadecimal 0048, 0069, 0020, 004D, 006F, 004D, 0020, 263A, 0021)
may be encoded as follows:
Hi Mom +Jjo-!
Example. The Unicode sequence representing the Han characters for
the Japanese word "nihongo" (hexadecimal 65E5,672C,8A9E) may be
encoded as follows:
+ZeVnLIqe-
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
Use of Character Set UTF-7 Within MIME
Character set UTF-7 is safe for mail transmission and therefore may
be used with any content transfer encoding in MIME (except where line
length and line break restrictions are violated). Specifically, the 7
bit encoding for bodies and the Q encoding for headers are both
acceptable. The MIME character set identifier is UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7.
Example. Here is a text portion of a MIME message containing the
Unicode sequence "Hi Mom !" (hexadecimal 0048,
0069, 0020, 004D, 006F, 004D, 0020, 263A, 0021).
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7
Hi Mom +Jjo-!
Example. Here is a text portion of a MIME message containing the
Unicode sequence representing the Han characters for the Japanese
word "nihongo" (hexadecimal 65E5,672C,8A9E).
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7
+ZeVnLIqe-
Example. Here is a text portion of a MIME message containing the
Unicode sequence "A." (hexadecimal
0041,2262,0391,002E).
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7
A+ImIDkQ.
Example. Here is a text portion of a MIME message containing the
Unicode sequence "Item 3 is 1." (hexadecimal 0049,
0074, 0065, 006D, 0020, 0033, 0020, 0069, 0073, 0020, 00A3, 0031,
002E).
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7
Item 3 is +AKM-1.
Note that to achieve the best interoperability with systems that may
not support Unicode or MIME, when preparing text for mail
transmission line breaks should follow Internet conventions. This
means that lines should be short and terminated with the proper SMTP
CRLF sequence. Unicode LINE SEPARATOR (hexadecimal 2028) and
PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR (hexadecimal 2029) should be converted to SMTP
line breaks. Ideally, this would be handled transparently by a
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
Unicode-aware user agent.
This preparation is not absolutely necessary, since UTF-7 and the
appropriate MIME content transfer encoding can handle text that does
not follow Internet conventions, but readability by systems without
Unicode or MIME will be impaired. See RFC 1521 for an in-depth
discussion of mail interoperability issues.
Lines should never be broken in the middle of a UTF-7 shifted
sequence, since such sequences may not cross line breaks. Therefore,
UTF-7 encoding should take place after line breaking. If a line
containing a shifted sequence is too long after encoding, a MIME
content transfer encoding such as Quoted Printable can be used to
encode the text. Another possibility is to perform line breaking and
UTF-7 encoding at the same time, so that lines containing shifted
sequences already conform to length restrictions.
Discussion
In this section we will motivate the introduction of UTF-7 as opposed
to the alternative of using the existing transformation formats of
Unicode (e.g., UTF-8) with MIME's content transfer encodings. Before
discussing this, it will be useful to list some assumptions about
character frequency within typical natural language text strings that
we use to estimate typical storage requirements:
1. Most Western European languages use roughly 7/8 of their letters
from US-ASCII and 1/8 from Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1).
2. Most non-European alphabet-based languages (e.g., Greek) use about
1/6 of their letters from ASCII (since white space is in the 7-bit
area) and the rest from their alphabets.
3. East Asian ideographic-based languages (including Japanese) use
essentially all of their characters from the Han or CJK syllabary
area.
4. Non-directly encoded punctuation characters do not occur
frequently enough to affect the results.
Notice that current 8 bit standards, such as ISO-8859-x, require use
of a content transfer encoding. For comparison with the subsequent
discussion, the costs break down as follows (note that many of these
figures are approximate since they depend on the exact composition of
the text):
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
8859-x in Base64
Text type Average octets/character
All 1.33
8859-x in Quoted Printable
Text type Average octets/character
US-ASCII 1
Western European 1.25
Other 2.67
Note also that Unicode encoded in Base64 takes a constant 2.67 octets
per character. For purposes of comparison, we will look at UTF-8 in
Base64 and Quoted Printable, and UTF-7. UTF-1 gives results
substantially similar to UTF-8. Also note that fixed overhead for
long strings is relative to 1/n, where n is the encoded string length
in octets.
UTF-8 in Base64
Text type Average octets/character
US-ASCII 1.33
Western European 1.5
Some Alphabetics 2.44
All others 4
UTF-8 in Quoted Printable
Text type Average octets/character
US-ASCII 1
Western European 1.63
Some Alphabetics 5.17
All others 7-9
UTF-7
Text type Average octets/character
Most US-ASCII 1
Western European 1.5
All others 2.67+2/n
We feel that the UTF-8 in Quoted Printable option is not viable due
to the very large expansion of all text except Western European. This
would only be viable in texts consisting of large expanses of US-
ASCII or Latin characters with occasional other characters
interspersed. We would prefer to introduce one encoding that works
reasonably well for all users.
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
We also feel that UTF-8 in Base64 has high expansion for non-
Western-European users, and is less desirable because it cannot be
read directly, even when the content is largely US-ASCII. The base
encoding of UTF-7 gives competitive results and is readable for ASCII
text.
UTF-7 gives results competitive with ISO-8859-x, with access to all
of the Unicode character set. We believe this justifies the
introduction of a new transformation format of Unicode.
As an alternative to use of UTF-7, it is possible to intermix Unicode
characters with other character sets using an existing MIME
mechanism, the multipart/mixed content type (thanks to Nathaniel
Borenstein for pointing this out). For instance (repeating an earlier
example):
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=foo
--foo
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Hi Mom
--foo
Content-type: text/plain; charset=UNICODE-1-1
Content-transfer-encoding: base64
Jjo=
--foo
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
!
--foo--
Theoretically, this removes the need for UTF-7 in message bodies
(multipart may not be used in header fields). However, we feel that
as use of the Unicode character set becomes more widespread,
intermittent use of specialized Unicode characters (such as dingbats
and mathematical symbols) will occur, and that text will also
typically include small snippets from other scripts, such as
Cyrillic, Greek, or East Asian languages (anything in the Roman
script is already handled adequately by existing MIME character
sets). Although the multipart technique works well for large chunks
of text in alternating character sets, we feel it does not adequately
support the kinds of uses just discussed, and so we still believe the
introduction of UTF-7 is justified.
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
Summary
The UTF-7 encoding allows Unicode characters to be encoded within the
US-ASCII 7 bit character set. It is most effective for Unicode
sequences which contain relatively long strings of US-ASCII
characters interspersed with either single Unicode characters or
strings of Unicode characters, as it allows the US-ASCII portions to
be read on systems without direct Unicode support.
UTF-7 should only be used with 7 bit transports such as mail and
news. In other contexts, use of straight Unicode or UTF-8 is
preferred.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following people for their contributions,
comments, and suggestions. If we have omitted anyone it was through
oversight and not intentionally.
Glenn Adams
Harald T. Alvestrand
Nathaniel Borenstein
Lee Collins
Jim Conklin
Dave Crocker
Steve Dorner
Dana S. Emery
Ned Freed
Kari E. Hurtta
John H. Jenkins
John C. Klensin
Valdis Kletnieks
Keith Moore
Masataka Ohta
Einar Stefferud
Erik M. van der Poel
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
Appendix A -- Examples
Here is a longer example, taken from a document originally in Big5
code. It has been condensed for brevity. There are two versions: the
first uses optional characters from set O (and thus may not pass
through some mail gateways), and the second uses no optional
characters.
Content-type: text/plain; charset=unicode-1-1-utf-7
Below is the full Chinese text of the Analects (+itaKng-).
The sources for the text are:
"The sayings of Confucius," James R. Ware, trans. +U/BTFw-:
+ZYeB9FH6ckh5Pg-, 1980. (Chinese text with English translation)
+Vttm+E6UfZM-, +W4tRQ066bOg-, +UxdOrA-: +Ti1XC2b4Xpc-, 1990.
"The Chinese Classics with a Translation, Critical and
Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copius Indexes," James
Legge, trans., Taipei: Southern Materials Center Publishing,
Inc., 1991. (Chinese text with English translation)
Big Five and GB versions of the text are being made available
separately.
Neither the Big Five nor GB contain all the characters used in
this text. Missing characters have been indicated using their
Unicode/ISO 10646 code points. "U+-" followed by four
hexadecimal digits indicates a Unicode/10646 code (e.g.,
U+-9F08). There is no good solution to the problem of the small
size of the Big Five/GB character sets; this represents the
solution I find personally most satisfactory.
(omitted...)
I have tried to minimize this problem by using variant
characters where they were available and the character
actually in the text was not. Only variants listed as such in
the +XrdxmVtXUXg- were used.
(omitted...)
John H. Jenkins
+TpVPXGBG-
John_Jenkins@taligent.com
5 January 1993
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
(omitted...)
Content-type: text/plain; charset=unicode-1-1-utf-7
Below is the full Chinese text of the Analects (+itaKng-).
The sources for the text are:
+ACI-The sayings of Confucius,+ACI- James R. Ware, trans. +U/BTFw-:
+ZYeB9FH6ckh5Pg-, 1980. (Chinese text with English translation)
+Vttm+E6UfZM-, +W4tRQ066bOg-, +UxdOrA-: +Ti1XC2b4Xpc-, 1990.
+ACI-The Chinese Classics with a Translation, Critical and
Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copius Indexes,+ACI- James
Legge, trans., Taipei: Southern Materials Center Publishing,
Inc., 1991. (Chinese text with English translation)
Big Five and GB versions of the text are being made available
separately.
Neither the Big Five nor GB contain all the characters used in
this text. Missing characters have been indicated using their
Unicode/ISO 10646 code points. +ACI-U+-+ACI- followed by four
hexadecimal digits indicates a Unicode/10646 code (e.g.,
U+-9F08). There is no good solution to the problem of the small
size of the Big Five/GB character sets+ADs- this represents the
solution I find personally most satisfactory.
(omitted...)
I have tried to minimize this problem by using variant
characters where they were available and the character
actually in the text was not. Only variants listed as such in
the +XrdxmVtXUXg- were used.
(omitted...)
John H. Jenkins
+TpVPXGBG-
John+AF8-Jenkins+AEA-taligent.com
5 January 1993
(omitted...)
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
Security Considerations
Security issues are not discussed in this memo.
References
[UNICODE 1.1] "The Unicode Standard, Version 1.1": Version 1.0, Volume
1 (ISBN 0-201-56788-1), Version 1.0, Volume 2 (ISBN 0-
201-60845-6), and "Unicode Technical Report #4, The
Unicode Standard, Version 1.1" (available from The
Unicode Consortium, and soon to be published by Addison-
Wesley).
[ISO 10646] ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993(E) Information Technology--Universal
Multiple-octet Coded Character Set (UCS).
[MIME/UNICODE] Goldsmith, D., and M. Davis, "Using Unicode with MIME",
RFC 1641, Taligent, Inc., July 1994.
[US-ASCII] Coded Character Set--7-bit American Standard Code for
Information Interchange, ANSI X3.4-1986.
[ISO-8859] Information Processing -- 8-bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic
Character Sets -- Part 1: Latin Alphabet No. 1, ISO
8859-1:1987. Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, ISO 8859-2,
1987. Part 3: Latin alphabet No. 3, ISO 8859-3, 1988.
Part 4: Latin alphabet No. 4, ISO 8859-4, 1988. Part 5:
Latin/Cyrillic alphabet, ISO 8859-5, 1988. Part 6:
Latin/Arabic alphabet, ISO 8859-6, 1987. Part 7:
Latin/Greek alphabet, ISO 8859-7, 1987. Part 8:
Latin/Hebrew alphabet, ISO 8859-8, 1988. Part 9: Latin
alphabet No. 5, ISO 8859-9, 1990.
[RFC822] Crocker, D., "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet
Text Messages", STD 11, RFC 822, UDEL, August 1982.
[RFC-1521] Borenstein N., and N. Freed, "MIME (Multipurpose Internet
Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and
Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC
1521, Bellcore, Innosoft, September 1993.
[RFC-1522] Moore, K., "Representation of Non-Ascii Text in Internet
Message Headers" RFC 1522, University of Tennessee,
September 1993.
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RFC 1642 UTF-7 July 1994
[UTF-8] X/Open Company Ltd., "File System Safe UCS Transformation
Format (FSS_UTF)", X/Open Preliminary Specification,
Document Number: P316. This information also appears in
Unicode Technical Report #4, and in a forthcoming annex
to ISO/IEC 10646.
Authors' Addresses
David Goldsmith
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233
Phone: 408-777-5225
Fax: 408-777-5081
EMail: david_goldsmith@taligent.com
Mark Davis
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233
Phone: 408-777-5116
Fax: 408-777-5081
EMail: mark_davis@taligent.com
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