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When converting between different encoding schemes, extreme care must be taken in handling any initial byte order marks. The use of the initial byte sequence as a signature on UTF-8 byte sequences is not recommended.

[TUS Ch. 3.10]

Planes

The Unicode codespace consists of the single range of numeric values from 0 to 10FFFF₁₆. It has proven convenient to think of it as divided up into 16 planes of 64K characters each.

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