Many programs will supply one or more of the following as file encoding formats: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 and simply Unicode. How do I know what Unicode Transformation Format Unicode is referring to? I'm assuming it correlates to to one of the 8/16/32 formats but I have not been able to find that on the Unicode website.
What Unicode Transformation Format is being represented when just Unicode is written?
unicode;character encoding
Unicode is a standard that defines  a list of abstract characters, rendering rules, code points, composition rules, and encoding systems. For example: the small greek epsilon is the character U+03B5 the small c with a cedilla is the character U+00E7, but also the the small C U+0063 combined with the cedilla U+0327 UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF32 are encoding formats for unicode characters on 8,16, or 32 bit integers.  It should be added that when looking at the byte streams (e.g. files), UTF-16 and UTF-32 have both a big endian (BE) and a little endian (LE) variant. So speaking of unicode encoding is misleading: there is not a single one.  But there are common usage of this term: on Windows, when you say UNICODE, it is assumed that it's UTF-16 encoding. In the windows API, the default unicode encoding uses a wchar_t which is mapped to a 16 bit integer. on Linux, the preferred encoding for unicode is UTF-8. There's by the way an UTF-8 everywhere manifest that explains the rationale behind and try to promote this practice.  