Unicode Demystified

BOCU

An interesting alternative to SCSU for Unicode compression was proposed in a recent paper on IBM's DeveloperWorks Web site.^[2] Called “Binary Ordered Compression for Unicode (BOCU), it provides compression ratios comparable to SCSU, but with a number of interesting advantages. Chief among them is that a set of Unicode strings encoded in BOCU sorts in the same order as the unencoded strings would, making it useful for encoding short snippets of text in environments where the sort order is still important (think database applications). The algorithm is also a lot simpler than SCSU.

^[2] Mark Davis and Markus Scherer, “Binary-Ordered Compression for Unicode,” IBM DeveloperWorks, http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/unicode/library/u-binary.html ...