1986 in Greece

# 1986 in Greece

## Abstract

Events in the year 1986 in Greece.

## Incumbents

- President – Christos Sartzetakis

- Prime Minister of Greece – Andreas Papandreou

## Events

- 13 September – The 6.0 M Kalamata earthquake shook the area with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme). The shock left 20 dead and caused $5 million in damage.

## Births

- 3 June – Alexandros Karageorgiou, archer

- 9 November – Eleni Andriola, rhythmic gymnast

- 26 December – Marina Satti, singer


Celtic cross

# Celtic cross

## Abstract

The Celtic cross is a form of Christian cross featuring a nimbus or ring that emerged in Ireland, France and Great Britain in the Early Middle Ages. A type of ringed cross, it became widespread through its use in the stone high crosses erected across the islands, especially in regions evangelised by Irish missionaries, from the ninth through the 12th centuries.

A staple of Insular art, the Celtic cross is essentially a Latin cross with a nimbus surrounding the intersection of the arms and stem. Scholars have debated its exact origins, but it is related to earlier crosses featuring rings. The form gained new popularity during the Celtic Revival of the 19th century; the name "Celtic cross" is a convention dating from that time. The shape, usually decorated with interlace and other motifs from Insular art, became popular for funerary monuments and other uses, and has remained so, spreading well beyond Ireland.

## Early history

Ringed crosses similar to older Continental forms appeared in Ireland, England and Scotland in incised stone slab artwork and artifacts like the Ardagh chalice. However, the shape achieved its greatest popularity by its use in the monumental stone high crosses, a distinctive and widespread form of Insular art. These monuments, which first appeared in the ninth century, usually (though not always) take the form of a ringed cross on a stepped or pyramidal base. The form has obvious structural advantages, reducing the length of unsupported side arms. There are a number of theories as to its origin in Ireland and Britain. Some scholars consider the ring a holdover from earlier wooden crosses, which may have required struts to support the crossarm. Others have seen it as deriving from indigenous Bronze Age art featuring a wheel or disc around a head, or from early Coptic crosses based on the ankh. However, Michael W. Herren, Shirley Ann Brown, and others believe it originates in earlier ringed crosses in Christian art. Crosses with a ring representing the celestial sphere developed from the writings of the Church Fathers. The "cosmological cross" is an important motif in Coelius Sedulius 's poem Carmen Paschale, known in Ireland by the seventh century.

It is not clear where the first high crosses originated. The first examples date to about the ninth century and occur in two groups: at Ahenny in Ireland, and at Iona, an Irish monastery off the Scottish coast. The Ahenny group is generally earlier. However, it is possible that St. Johns Cross at Iona was the first high cross; Iona's influence as a center of pilgrimage may have led this cross to inspire the Ahenny group as well as other ringed crosses in Pictish stones.

A variety of crosses bear inscriptions in ogham, an early medieval Irish alphabet. Standing crosses in Ireland and areas under Irish influence tend to be shorter and more massive than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, which have mostly lost their headpieces. Irish examples with a head in cross form include the Cross of Kells, Ardboe High Cross, the crosses at Monasterboice, the Cross of the Scriptures, Clonmacnoise and those in Scotland at Iona and the Kildalton Cross, which may be the earliest to survive in good condition. Surviving, free-standing crosses are in Cornwall, including St Piran 's cross at Perranporth, and Wales. Other stone crosses are found in the former Northumbria and Scotland, and further south in England, where they merge with the similar Anglo-Saxon cross making tradition, in the Ruthwell Cross for example. Most examples in Britain were destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. By about A.D. 1200 the initial wave of cross building came to an end in Ireland.

Popular legend in Ireland says that the Christian cross was introduced by Saint Patrick or possibly Saint Declan, though there are no examples from this early period. It has often been claimed that Patrick combined the symbol of Christianity with the sun cross to give pagan followers an idea of the importance of the cross. By linking it with the idea of the life-giving properties of the sun, these two ideas were linked to appeal to pagans. Other interpretations claim that placing the cross on top of the circle represents Christ's supremacy over the pagan sun.

Notable high crosses with the Celtic shape in Ireland:

- Ahenny, County Tipperary

- Ardboe County Tyrone

- Carndonagh high cross, County Donegal

- Drumcliff, County Sligo

- Dysert O'Dea Monastery, County Clare

- Glendalough County Wicklow St. Kevin's Cross

- Killamery, County Kilkenny

- Kloster Fahan Fahan, County Donegal

- Monasterboice, County Louth

- Clonmacnoise Cross of the Scriptures, County Offaly

- Clonmacnoise North Cross, County Offaly

- Clonmacnoise South Cross, County Offaly

- Kells, County Meath

- Moone, County Kildare

- Campbeltown Cross

- Iona Abbey Crosses

- Inchbraoch Cross

- Kildalton Cross

- Massacre of Glencoe Monument

- Meigle 1 Cross

- St. Martin's Cross at Iona Abbey

- St Gordian's Kirk Cross

- Govan Old Parish Church Cross

- Weem, Aberfeldy

- Mateer Memorial Church, Kerala, India

## Modern times

### Celtic Revival

The Celtic Revival of the mid-19th century led to an increased use and creation of Celtic crosses in Ireland. In 1853, casts of several historical high crosses were exhibited at the Dublin Industrial Exhibition. In 1857, Henry O'Neill published Illustrations of the Most Interesting of the Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland. These two events stimulated interest in the Celtic cross as a symbol for a renewed sense of heritage within Ireland.

New versions of the high cross were designed for fashionable cemetery monuments in Victorian Dublin in the 1860s. From Dublin, the revival spread to the rest of the country and beyond. Since the Celtic Revival, the ringed cross became an emblem of Celtic identity, in addition to its more traditional religious symbolism.

Modern interest in the symbol increased because of Alexander and Euphemia Ritchie. The two worked on the island of Iona in Scotland from 1899 to 1940 and popularised use of the Celtic cross in jewelry. Using the Celtic cross in fashion is still popular today.

Since its revival in the 1850s, the Celtic cross has been used extensively as grave markers, straying from medieval usage, when the symbol was typically used for a public monument. The Celtic cross now appears in various retail items. Both the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Northern Ireland national football team have used versions of the Celtic cross in their logos and advertising. The Church in Wales since 1954 have used a flag with a Celtic cross in the centre.

A Celtic cross is often used to represent Presbyterianism, including by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

### White supremacist symbolism

A version of the Celtic cross is used as a symbol by white supremacists. It was used by Nazis in Norway in the 1930s and 1940s, and more recently it has been used by neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other white supremacist groups. In general, white supremacists use a version of the symbol with a square cross as opposed to the traditional elongated cross. This symbol forms part of the logo of Stormfront.

It is suggested that adoption of the symbol in the context of right-wing politics is linked with the activity of Jesuit priest Paul Doncœur, a prominent figure of the interwar scout movement in France. In 1924, the victory of anti-clerical Cartel des Gauches in general elections caused the mobilisation of right-wing forces, with Doncœur playing a major role in formation of Fédération Nationale Catholique and Ligue DRAC. The same year, impressed by Quickborn, a Catholic organisation within the German Youth Movement, he founded its local equivalent, Cadets. Doncœur, inspired by the G. K. Chesterton's novel The Ball and the Cross, decided that the symbol of the movement, croix cadet, should consist of a circle, representing the material world, supported by a square Christian cross intersecting it.

After the Fall of France, Vichy government relied on pre-existing organisations to implement its youth policy according to the principles of the National Revolution. The field was dominated by Catholic scout movements, the leaders of which were put in charge of Secretariat-General of Youth. In 1941, the symbol of Doncœur, now named croix celtique, was adopted as an emblem for Cadets of the Légion in Algeria, a youth movement within Légion Française des Combattants, a veteran organisation which the government hoped could be transformed to function as the single party of the state. Then it was used as insignia of Equipes nationales, a youth civilian service institution founded in 1942. After the war, Pierre Sidos appropriated the symbol as an emblem of the far-right movement Jeune Nation, founded by him in 1949.

White supremacist use of the long and short Celtic cross represents only a small minority of the symbol's use. The symbol in both forms is used by non-extremists in contexts such as Christianity, neo-Paganism, and Irish patriotism. The vast majority of uses of the Celtic cross are not associated with white supremacists.

### Unicode

In Unicode, the Celtic cross is represented by the code point U+1F548 🕈 CELTIC CROSS.


1987 in Greece

# 1987 in Greece

## Abstract

Events in the year 1987 in Greece.

## Incumbents

- President – Christos Sartzetakis

- Prime Minister of Greece – Andreas Papandreou


2024–25 Ferencvárosi TC season

# 2024–25 Ferencvárosi TC season

## Abstract

The 2024–25 season is Ferencvárosi Torna Club 's 121th competitive season, 16th consecutive season in the Nemzeti Bajnokság I, where they will be competing as six-time defending champions and 126th year in existence as a football club. In addition to the domestic league, Ferencváros participate in this season's editions of the Magyar Kupa, UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League.

## Kits

Supplier: Macron / Sponsor: Magyar Telekom / Tippmix

### Kit usage

We indicate in parentheses the number of round.

## First team squad

Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality.

## Transfers

### Summer

Sources:

### Out on loan

Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality.

Sources:

## Friendlies

Win Draw Loss Fixtures

### Pre-season

### Mid-season

Source:

## Competitions

### Overall record

In italics, we indicate the Final position achieved in competition(s) that have not yet been completed.

Last updated: 15 September 2024 Source: Soccerway

### Nemzeti Bajnokság I

#### League table

#### Results summary

Last updated: 1 September 2024. Source: Soccerway

#### Results by round

#### Matches

Win Draw Loss Postponed

Source:

#### Results overview

All results are indicated from the perspective of Ferencvárosi TC. We indicate in parentheses the number of round. Win Draw Loss Postponed

### Magyar Kupa

#### Round of 64

The draw for the Round of 64 was held on 26 August 2024. Budafok also started the Magyar Kupa competitions in this round.

#### Round of 32

The draw for the Round of 32 will hold on 16 September 2024.

### UEFA Champions League

#### Second qualifying round

Ferencváros won 7–1 on aggregate.

#### Third qualifying round

Midtjylland won 3–1 on aggregate.

### UEFA Europa League

#### Play-off round

1–1 on aggregate, Ferencváros won 3–2 on penalties.

#### League phase

The draw for the League phase was held on 30 August 2024. The team for League Phase: Goalkeepers: Dibusz, Á. Varga – Defenders: Botka, Cissé, Ćivić, Gartenmann, Gustavo, Kaján, Ramírez, Szalai – Midfielders: Abu Fani, Ben Romdhane, Kady, Maïga, Makreckis, Rommens, A. Tóth, Zachariassen – Forwards: Saldanha, Gruber, Misidjan, Pešić, Traoré, B. Varga

## Squad statistics

### Appearances

Includes all competitions for senior teams. We indicate the number of the player's appearances as substitute by the combination of a plus sign and a figure.

Notes: GK: goalkeeper; DF: defender; MF: midfielder; FW: forward

### Goal scorers

Includes all competitions for senior teams. The list is sorted by squad number when season-total goals are equal. Players with no goals not included in the list. We indicate in parentheses how many of the goals scored by the player from penalties.

### Assists

Includes all competitions for senior teams. The list is sorted by squad number when season-total assists are equal. Players with no assists not included in the list.

### Goalkeppers

#### Clean sheets

Includes all competitions for senior teams. The list is sorted by squad number when season-total clean sheets are equal. Numbers in parentheses represent games where both goalkeepers participated and both kept a clean sheet; the number in parentheses is awarded to the goalkeeper who was substituted on, whilst a full clean sheet is awarded to the goalkeeper who was on the field at the start of play.

### Disciplinary record

Includes all competitions for senior teams. The list is sorted by red cards, then yellow cards (and by squad number when total cards are equal). Players with no cards not included in the list.

### Captains

Includes all competitions for senior teams. The list is sorted by squad number when season-total number of games where a player started as captain are equal. Players with no games started as captain not included in the list.

## Attendances

Home stadium: Groupama Arena, Budapest – Capacity: 23,700 (22,122 in international matches)

## Awards and nominations

### Weekly awards

#### Player of the Round

Player of the Week by Nemzeti Sport and Round Selection of Nemzeti Bajnokság by Nemzeti Sport and Csakfoci websites.

#### Goal of the Round

Goal of the Round of Nemzeti Bajnokság by the M4 Sport website.

- Score – The score at the time of the goal. Ferencvárosi TC's score listed first.

- Final score – The score at full time; Ferencvárosi TC's listed first.

### Monthly awards

#### Player of the Month

Player of the Month by Ferencvárosi TC (Sponsored: HSA Group).

### Yearly awards

## Milestones

Debuts

The following players made their competitive debuts for Ferencvárosi TC's first team during the campaign.

50th appearances

The following players made their 50th appearances for Ferencvárosi TC's first team during the campaign.

First goals

The following players scored their first goals for Ferencvárosi TC's first team during the campaign.

- Score – The score at the time of the goal. Ferencvárosi TC's score listed first.

- Final score – The score at full time; Ferencvárosi TC's listed first.


Christopher Oluwole Rotimi

# Christopher Oluwole Rotimi

## Abstract

Christopher Oluwole Rotimi (born 20 February 1935) is a retired Nigerian Army brigadier general, diplomat and politician, he served during the Nigerian Civil War, and was the Governor of Western State while Nigeria was under military rule from 1971 to 1975. Oluwole Rotimi became the Nigerian Ambassador to the United States in 2007.

## Early life

Oluwole Rotimi was born 20 February 1935, in Abeokuta, Nigeria to a Yoruban family. He attended Agooko Methodist School, Lisabi school, Olowogbowo Methodist School as well as Kings College Lagos, after which he earned a BA at the University College Ibadan.

Oluwole Joined the Nigerian Army in 1960 and served as part of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He rose to become the first African Deputy Quartermaster General and the third non-white Quartermaster General of the Nigerian Army in 1966. During the Nigerian Civil War Oluwole Rotimi provided logistics support for the Federal Government's war efforts. He became the commander of the Ibadan Garrison between 1969 and 1970.

## Governor of Western State

After the war Oluwole Rotimi became the Military Governor of Western State of Nigeria in 1971, under Yakubu Gowon in succession to Brigadier Adeyinka Adebayo. During his time as governor, the state had peace and development.

### Projects As Governor

- The Cement Factory at Shagamu

- The Wire and Cable Factory in Ibadan

- The Ceramic Factory in Abeokuta

- The Wood Processing Factory in Ondo

- The palm oil Mill at Okitipupa.

## 1975 coup

In 1975, Oluwole Rotimi was removed from office as governor of Western Nigeria after the 1975 coup d'état. The following administration led by General Murtala Mohammed, commissioned a panel to investigate corruption amongst that past governors of the past administration. Oluwole Rotimi, together with Mobolaji Johnson-Brigadier (Lagos State Governor) was one of the only two governors exonerated.

## Under Obasanjo

In 1999 Gen. Oluwole Rotimi was appointed by the President Olusegun Obasanjo as the Head of a Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Federal Government Landed Property.

Oluwole Rotimi was honored with a National Award of Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) in 2003.

In 2005, Oluwole Rotimi was appointed a member of the National Constitutional Review Conference representing his home state- Ogun State.

## Ambassador

Oluwole Rotimi became the Ambassador to the United States of America in March 2008. He was sacked from the post in March 2009 by the President of Nigeria, Umaru Yar'Adua after allegations of insubordination.


Essendon Keilor College

# Essendon Keilor College

## Abstract

Essendon Keilor College was founded in 1992 from the amalgamation of Queens Park Secondary College (formerly Essendon Technical School), Essendon High School, Niddrie High School and Keilor Heights Secondary College.

Essendon Keilor College (current enrolment approx 1800) is a multi-campus college providing state education primarily to students from the North and West of Melbourne. The college consists of two Junior Campuses located at Keilor and Niddrie and one Senior Campus located at Essendon.

The Essendon Keilor College uniform is a white coloured shirt with the symbol of the school on the left chest and dark blue coloured pants. A dark blue jumper with the school symbol is worn in winter.

## Campuses

### Niddrie

The Niddrie Campus is located in Airport West at the end of Peters Street and is directly beside Niddrie Primary School. It serves from Year 7 to Year 9. It was Niddrie High School until it became part of Essendon Keilor College in 1992.

Between 1994 and 2015, Western Autistic School ran a program for adolescents called the Baseroom out of a room at the campus. Due to budget cuts, the program closed down at the end of the 2015 school year.

Prior to joining Essendon Keilor College the boys' uniform consisted of grey jean slacks, a light blue shirt with a navy blue print of a planet splitting in the middle and a jumper with the same pattern but reverse colours.

### Keilor East

The East Keilor Campus is located in East Keilor on Quinn Grove, next to the East Keilor Leisure Centre. It also serves Year 7 to Year 9. The school was known as Keilor Heights High School from 1968 to 1992.

The old Keilor Heights High School uniform consisted of grey slacks and a light blue shirt for boys, while girls wore a light blue dress or navy skirt, both checked with red, yellow, green and blue. The navy school jumper bore the school's logo of an open book and the motto 'Seek the Highest'.

### Essendon

The Essendon Campus is located in Essendon at 286-290 Buckley Street. This campus serves Year 10, 11 and 12 students, and features specialised facilities for VCE studies.

Before becoming part of Essendon Keilor College in 1992 the school was called Essendon High School. The Federation Style school quadrangle, designed in 1910 and constructed between 1912 and 1913, was the first purpose-built high school building in metropolitan Melbourne. Both the quadrangle and the Georgian Revival school hall (constructed 1925–1926) are classified by the National Trust

## Notable alumni

- Tash Sultana, musician

- Tom Sheridan, Australian rules footballer

- Ryan Crowley, Australian rules footballer

- Shaun McKernan, Australian rules footballer

- Andrew Welsh, Australian rules footballer

- Jeremy Laidler, Australian rules footballer

- Brent Reilly, Australian rules footballer

- Lynden Dunn, Australian rules footballer

- Paul Ahern, Australian rules footballer

- Kyle Hartigan, Australian rules footballer

- Mitch Banner, Australian rules footballer

- Callum Moore

- Corey Ellis, Australian rules footballer

### Essendon High School

- Barry Davis, Australian rules footballer

- Brian Fitzpatrick, historian, civil libertarian

- Ken Fletcher, Australian rules footballer

- Ted Hill, Australian barrister and communist activist

- James Housden, bishop

- Clare Stevenson, inaugural Director of the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force

- Alan Villiers, author and adventurer

- Tim Watson, Australian rules footballer, sports commentator

- Robert Murray Senior Lecturer, Teacher Education Training, The University of Melbourne, Hawthorn Campus.

## References and external links

- School homepage

37°44′25.25″S 144°52′14.59″E / 37.7403472°S 144.8707194°E


1988 in Greece

# 1988 in Greece

## Abstract

Events in the year 1988 in Greece.

## Incumbents

- President – Christos Sartzetakis

- Prime Minister of Greece – Andreas Papandreou

## Births

- 4 March – Sophia Ralli, skier

- 27 June – Stefani Bismpikou, artistic gymnast

- 14 September – Theodora Pallidou, rhythmic gymnast

- 30 December – Maria Apostolidi, artistic gymnast

## Deaths

- 17 March – Nikolas Asimos, composer and singer (born 1949)

- unknown date – Angelos Lembesi, Olympic skier (born 1917)


Michigan Wolverines men's soccer

# Michigan Wolverines men's soccer

## Abstract

The Michigan Wolverines men's soccer team is the intercollegiate soccer program representing the University of Michigan. The school competes in the Big Ten Conference in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

## History

Soccer became a varsity sport at the University of Michigan in 2000. The team plays at the U-M Soccer Stadium that was built in 2010.

## Roster

Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality.

## Coaching staff

Source

## Colors and badge

The team colors of Michigan are maize and blue. The badge is formed in a shape of a shield. At the top it has the word Michigan inscribed in maize behind a blue background, with the word Soccer on the bottom and a block M in the middle.

## Stadium

Michigan has played at the U-M Soccer Complex since 2008, and at the U-M Soccer Stadium (built on the site of the Soccer Complex) since 2010. The entire complex cost $6 million to build and includes three fields, including separate practice fields for both the men's and women's teams. The 2,200-seat stadium is built around the central field, and it includes stands on both sides of the field that are both covered by a roof. The stadium features a press box, separate home locker rooms for both the men's and women's teams, an athletic medicine training room, and handicap seating, as well as restrooms and concessions for spectators.

## Michigan Ultras

The Michigan Ultras is the student support section for both the men's and the women's team. They support the Michigan Wolverines men's and women's soccer teams from the student section. The section consists of over 900 members, is located in the student bleachers of the U-M Soccer Complex, and is a registered official student organization with the University of Michigan. The Michigan Ultras was officially founded in the spring of 2010 by Matthew Peven. Possessing an ever-growing fanbase, their members are known for their loyal dedication in supporting the men's and women's soccer teams by creating an exciting and intimidating atmosphere through organized chanting and cheering. Several of their chants can be found on their YouTube page and website.

## Statistics

### Year-by-year record

Source

## Notable alumni

This is a list of former players who have received international caps and/or have played professional soccer.

- Tyler Arnone

- Francis Atuahene

- Marcello Borges

- Knox Cameron

- Luke Coulson

- Lars Eckenrode

- Adam Grinwis

- Michael Holody

- Evan Louro

- Peri Marosevic

- Justin Meram

- Robbie Mertz

- Kofi Opare

- Jackson Ragen

- Matt Rickard

- Soony Saad

- Kevin Taylor

- Marcos Ugarte


UTF-8

# UTF-8

## Abstract

UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit.

UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 (17 planes times 2 code points per plane, minus 2 technically-invalid surrogates) valid Unicode code points using a variable-width encoding of one to four one- byte (8-bit) code units. Code points with lower numerical values, which tend to occur more frequently, are encoded using fewer bytes. It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that a UTF-8-encoded document using only those characters is identical to the same text in ASCII and can be read by programs expecting such.

UTF-8 was designed as a superior alternative to UTF-1, a proposed variable-length encoding with partial ASCII compatibility which lacked some features including self-synchronization and fully ASCII-compatible handling of characters such as slashes. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike produced the first implementation for the Plan 9 operating system in September 1992. This led to its adoption by X/Open as its specification for FSS-UTF, which would first be officially presented at USENIX in January 1993 and subsequently adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC 2277 (BCP 18) for future internet standards work, replacing Single Byte Character Sets such as Latin-1 in older RFCs.

UTF-8 results in fewer internationalization issues than any alternative text encoding, and it has been implemented in all modern operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, and standards such as JSON, where, as is increasingly the case, it is the only allowed form of Unicode.

UTF-8 is the dominant encoding for the World Wide Web and other Internet technologies, accounting for 98.3% of all web pages, 99.1% of the top 100,000 pages, and up to 100% for many languages, as of 2024. Virtually all countries and languages have 95% or more use of UTF-8 encodings on the web.

## History

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) set out to compose a universal multi-byte character set in 1989. The draft ISO 10646 standard contained a non-required annex called UTF-1 that provided a byte stream encoding of its 32-bit code points. This encoding was not satisfactory on performance grounds, among other problems, and the biggest problem was probably that it did not have a clear separation between ASCII and non-ASCII: new UTF-1 tools would be backward compatible with ASCII-encoded text, but UTF-1-encoded text could confuse existing code expecting ASCII (or extended ASCII), because it could contain continuation bytes in the range 0x21–0x7E that meant something else in ASCII, e.g., 0x2F for /, the Unix path directory separator.

In July 1992, the X/Open committee XoJIG was looking for a better encoding. Dave Prosser of Unix System Laboratories submitted a proposal for one that had faster implementation characteristics and introduced the improvement that 7-bit ASCII characters would only represent themselves; all multi-byte sequences would include only bytes where the high bit was set. The name File System Safe UCS Transformation Format (FSS-UTF) and most of the text of this proposal were later preserved in the final specification. In August 1992, this proposal was circulated by an IBM X/Open representative to interested parties. A modification by Ken Thompson of the Plan 9 operating system group at Bell Labs made it self-synchronizing, letting a reader start anywhere and immediately detect character boundaries, at the cost of being somewhat less bit-efficient than the previous proposal. It also abandoned the use of biases and instead added the rule that only the shortest possible encoding is allowed; the additional loss in compactness is relatively insignificant, but readers now have to look out for invalid encodings to avoid reliability and especially security issues. Thompson's design was outlined on September 2, 1992, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner with Rob Pike. In the following days, Pike and Thompson implemented it and updated Plan 9 to use it throughout, and then communicated their success back to X/Open, which accepted it as the specification for FSS-UTF.

UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993. The Internet Engineering Task Force adopted UTF-8 in its Policy on Character Sets and Languages in RFC 2277 (BCP 18) for future internet standards work in January 1998, replacing Single Byte Character Sets such as Latin-1 in older RFCs.

In November 2003, UTF-8 was restricted by RFC 3629 to match the constraints of the UTF-16 character encoding: explicitly prohibiting code points corresponding to the high and low surrogate characters removed more than 3% of the three-byte sequences, and ending at U+10FFFF removed more than 48% of the four-byte sequences and all five- and six-byte sequences.

## Naming

The official name for the encoding is UTF-8, the spelling used in all Unicode Consortium documents. Most standards officially list it in upper case as well, but all that do are also case-insensitive and utf-8 is often used in code.

Some other spellings may also be accepted by standards, e.g. web standards (which include CSS, HTML, XML, and HTTP headers) explicitly allow utf8 (and disallow "unicode") and many aliases for encodings. Spellings with a space e.g. "UTF 8" should not be used. The official Internet Assigned Numbers Authority also lists csUTF8 as the only alias, which is rarely used.

In Windows, UTF-8 is codepage 65001 (i.e. CP_UTF8 in source code).

In MySQL, UTF-8 is called utf8mb4 (with utf8mb3, and its alias utf8, being a subset encoding for characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane).

In HP PCL, the Symbol-ID for UTF-8 is 18N.

In Oracle Database (since version 9.0), AL32UTF8 means UTF-8. Oracle previously used the UTF-8 name to refer to CESU-8, a deprecated variant.

UTF-8-BOM and UTF-8-NOBOM are sometimes used for text files which contain or do not contain a byte-order mark (BOM), respectively. In Japan especially, UTF-8 encoding without a BOM is sometimes called UTF-8N.

## Description

UTF-8 encodes code points in one to four bytes, depending on the value of the code point. In the following table, the x characters are replaced by the bits of the code point:

The first 128 code points (ASCII) need 1 byte. The next 1,920 code points need two bytes to encode, which covers the remainder of almost all Latin-script alphabets, and also IPA extensions, Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Thaana and N'Ko alphabets, as well as Combining Diacritical Marks. Three bytes are needed for the remaining 61,440 codepoints of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), including most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. Four bytes are needed for the 1,048,576 codepoints in the other planes of Unicode, which include emoji (pictographic symbols), less common CJK characters, various historic scripts, and mathematical symbols.

A whole graphic character can take more than 4 bytes, because it is made of more than one code point. For instance, a national flag character takes 8 bytes since it is "constructed from a pair of Unicode scalar values" both from outside the BMP. Some complex emoji characters can take even more than this: The transgender flag emoji (🏳⚧), which consists of the 5 code point sequence U+1F3F3 U+FE0F U+200D U+26A7 U+FE0F, requires sixteen bytes to encode, while that for the flag of Scotland (🏴) requires a total of 28 bytes for the 7 code point sequence U+1F3F4 U+E0067 U+E0062 U+E0073 U+E0063 U+E0074 U+E007F.

### Byte-order mark

If the Unicode byte-order mark (BOM, U+FEFF, technically the U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE character) is at the start of a UTF-8 file, the first three bytes will be 0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF.

The Unicode Standard neither requires nor recommends the use of the BOM for UTF-8, but warns that it may be encountered at the start of a file trans-coded from another encoding. While ASCII text encoded using UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII, this is not true when Unicode Standard recommendations are ignored and a BOM is added. A BOM can confuse software that isn't prepared for it but can otherwise accept UTF-8, e.g. programming languages that permit non-ASCII bytes in string literals but not at the start of the file. Nevertheless, there was and still is software that always inserts a BOM when writing UTF-8, and refuses to correctly interpret UTF-8 unless the first character is a BOM (or the file only contains ASCII).

### Invalid sequences and error handling

Not all sequences of bytes are valid UTF-8. A UTF-8 decoder should be prepared for:

- Bytes that never appear in UTF-8: C0, C1, F5 – FF

- A "continuation byte" (80 – BF) at the start of a character

- A non-continuation byte before the end of a character

- The string truncated before the end of a character

- An "overlong encoding" (using more bytes than necessary for a character)

- A 4-byte sequence that decodes to a value greater that U+10FFFF

Many of the first UTF-8 decoders would decode these, ignoring incorrect bits and accepting overlong results. Carefully crafted invalid UTF-8 could make them either skip or create ASCII characters such as NUL, slash, or quotes. Invalid UTF-8 has been used to bypass security validations in high-profile products including Microsoft's IIS web server and Apache's Tomcat servlet container. RFC 3629 states "Implementations of the decoding algorithm MUST protect against decoding invalid sequences." The Unicode Standard requires decoders to: "... treat any ill-formed code unit sequence as an error condition. This guarantees that it will neither interpret nor emit an ill-formed code unit sequence."

Since RFC 3629 (November 2003), the high and low surrogate halves used by UTF-16 (U+D800 through U+DFFF) are not legal Unicode values, and their UTF-8 encoding must be treated as an invalid byte sequence. This rule is often ignored as surrogate halves are allowed in Windows filenames and this means there has to be a way to store them in a string. UTF-8 that allows these surrogate halves has been (informally) called "WTF-8", while another variation that allows them and also encodes all non-BMP characters incorrectly as two surrogate halves is called CESU-8.

Throwing an exception or truncating a string when an error is encountred is a security hole, but was once common. This has the disadvantage that it can turn what would otherwise be harmless errors (such as a "no such file" error) into a denial of service. For instance early versions of Python 3.0 would exit immediately if the command line or environment variables contained invalid UTF-8.

Since Unicode 6 (October 2010), the standard (chapter 3) has recommended a "best practice" where the error is either one byte long, or ends before the first byte that is disallowed. In these decoders E1,A0,C0 is two errors (2 bytes in the first one). This means an error is no more than three bytes long and never contains the start of a valid character, and there are 21 952 different possible errors. The standard also recommends replacing each error with the replacement character "�" (U+FFFD). These recommendations are not often followed. It is common to consider each byte to be an error, in which case E1,A0,C0 is three errors (each 1 byte long). This means there are only 128 different errors, and it is also common to replace them with 128 different characters, to make the decoding "lossless".

### Characteristics

Some of the important features of this encoding are as follows:

- Backward compatibility: Backward compatibility with ASCII and the enormous amount of software designed to process ASCII-encoded text was the main driving force behind the design of UTF-8. In UTF-8, single bytes with values in the range of 0 to 127 map directly to Unicode code points in the ASCII range. Single bytes in this range represent characters, as they do in ASCII. Moreover, 7-bit bytes (bytes where the most significant bit is 0) never appear in a multi-byte sequence, and no valid multi-byte sequence decodes to an ASCII code-point. A sequence of 7-bit bytes is both valid ASCII and valid UTF-8, and under either interpretation represents the same sequence of characters. Therefore, the 7-bit bytes in a UTF-8 stream represent all and only the ASCII characters in the stream. Thus, many text processors, parsers, protocols, file formats, text display programs, etc., which use ASCII characters for formatting and control purposes, will continue to work as intended by treating the UTF-8 byte stream as a sequence of single-byte characters, without decoding the multi-byte sequences. ASCII characters on which the processing turns, such as punctuation, whitespace, and control characters will never be encoded as multi-byte sequences. It is therefore safe for such processors to simply ignore or pass-through the multi-byte sequences, without decoding them. For example, ASCII whitespace may be used to tokenize a UTF-8 stream into words; ASCII line-feeds may be used to split a UTF-8 stream into lines; and ASCII NUL characters can be used to split UTF-8-encoded data into null-terminated strings. Similarly, many format strings used by library functions like "printf" will correctly handle UTF-8-encoded input arguments.

- Fallback and auto-detection: Only a small subset of possible byte strings are a valid UTF-8 string: several bytes cannot appear; a byte with the high bit set cannot be alone; and further requirements mean that it is extremely unlikely that a readable text in any extended ASCII is valid UTF-8. Part of the popularity of UTF-8 is due to it providing a form of backward compatibility for these as well. A UTF-8 processor which erroneously receives extended ASCII as input can thus "auto-detect" this with very high reliability. A UTF-8 stream may simply contain errors, resulting in the auto-detection scheme producing false positives; but auto-detection is successful in the vast majority of cases, especially with longer texts, and is widely used. It also works to "fall back" or replace 8-bit bytes using the appropriate code-point for a legacy encoding when errors in the UTF-8 are detected, allowing recovery even if UTF-8 and legacy encoding is concatenated in the same file.

- Prefix code: The first byte indicates the number of bytes in the sequence. Reading from a stream can instantaneously decode each individual fully received sequence, without first having to wait for either the first byte of a next sequence or an end-of-stream indication. The length of multi-byte sequences is easily determined by humans as it is simply the number of high-order 1s in the leading byte. An incorrect character will not be decoded if a stream ends mid-sequence.

- Self-synchronization: The leading bytes and the continuation bytes do not share values (continuation bytes start with the bits 10 while single bytes start with 0 and longer lead bytes start with 11). This means a search will not accidentally find the sequence for one character starting in the middle of another character. It also means the start of a character can be found from a random position by backing up at most 3 bytes to find the leading byte. An incorrect character will not be decoded if a stream starts mid-sequence, and a shorter sequence will never appear inside a longer one.

- Sorting order: The chosen values of the leading bytes means that a list of UTF-8 strings can be sorted in code point order by sorting the corresponding byte sequences.

#### Compared to single-byte encodings

- UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character, avoiding the need to figure out and set a " code page " or otherwise indicate what character set is in use, and allowing output in multiple scripts at the same time. For many scripts there have been more than one single-byte encoding in usage, so even knowing the script was insufficient information to display it correctly.

- The bytes 0xFE and 0xFF do not appear, so a valid UTF-8 stream never matches the UTF-16 byte-order mark (BOM) and thus cannot be confused with it. The absence of 0xFF (0377) also eliminates the need to escape this byte in Telnet (and FTP control connection).

- UTF-8 encoded text is larger than specialized single-byte encodings except for plain ASCII characters. In the case of scripts which used 8-bit character sets with non-Latin characters encoded in the upper half (such as most Cyrillic and Greek alphabet code pages), characters in UTF-8 will be double the size. For some scripts, such as Thai and Devanagari (which is used by various South Asian languages), characters will triple in size. There are even examples where a single byte turns into a composite character in Unicode and is thus six times larger in UTF-8. This has caused objections in India and other countries.

- It is possible in UTF-8 (or any other multi-byte encoding) to split or truncate a string in the middle of a character. If the two pieces are not re-appended later before interpretation as characters, this can introduce an invalid sequence at both the end of the previous section and the start of the next, and some decoders will not preserve these bytes and result in data loss. Because UTF-8 is self-synchronizing this will however never introduce a different valid character, and it is also fairly easy to move the truncation point backward to the start of a character.

- If the code points are all the same size, measurements of a fixed number of them is easy. Due to ASCII-era documentation where "character" is used as a synonym for "byte" this is often considered important. However, by measuring string positions using bytes instead of "characters" most algorithms can be easily and efficiently adapted for UTF-8. Searching for a string within a long string can for example be done byte by byte; the self-synchronization property prevents false positives.

#### Compared to other multi-byte encodings

- UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character. Files in different scripts can be displayed correctly without having to choose the correct code page or font. For instance, Chinese and Arabic can be written in the same file without specialized markup or manual settings that specify an encoding.

- UTF-8 is self-synchronizing: character boundaries are easily identified by scanning for well-defined bit patterns in either direction. If bytes are lost due to error or corruption, one can always locate the next valid character and resume processing. If there is a need to shorten a string to fit a specified field, the previous valid character can easily be found. Many multi-byte encodings such as Shift JIS are much harder to resynchronize. This also means that byte-oriented string-searching algorithms can be used with UTF-8 (as a character is the same as a "word" made up of that many bytes), optimized versions of byte searches can be much faster due to hardware support and lookup tables that have only 256 entries. Self-synchronization does however require that bits be reserved for these markers in every byte, increasing the size.

- Efficient to encode using simple bitwise operations. UTF-8 does not require slower mathematical operations such as multiplication or division (unlike Shift JIS, GB 2312 and other encodings).

- UTF-8 will take more space than a multi-byte encoding designed for a specific script. East Asian legacy encodings generally used two bytes per character yet take three bytes per character in UTF-8.

#### Compared to UTF-16

- Byte encodings and UTF-8 are represented by byte arrays in programs, and often nothing needs to be done to a function when converting source code from a byte encoding to UTF-8. UTF-16 is represented by 16-bit word arrays, and converting to UTF-16 while maintaining compatibility with existing ASCII-based programs (such as was done with Windows) requires every API and data structure that takes a string to be duplicated, one version accepting byte strings and another version accepting UTF-16. If backward compatibility is not needed, all string handling still must be modified.

- Text encoded in UTF-8 will be smaller than the same text encoded in UTF-16 if there are more code points below U+0080 than in the range U+0800..U+FFFF. This is true for all modern European languages. It is often true even for languages like Chinese, due to the large number of spaces, newlines, digits, and HTML markup in typical files.

- Most communication (e.g. HTML and IP) and storage (e.g. for Unix) was designed for a stream of bytes. A UTF-16 string must use a pair of bytes for each code unit: The order of those two bytes becomes an issue and must be specified in the UTF-16 protocol, such as with a byte-order mark (BOM). If an odd number of bytes is missing from UTF-16, the whole rest of the string will be meaningless text. Any bytes missing from UTF-8 will still allow the text to be recovered accurately starting with the next character after the missing bytes.

- The order of those two bytes becomes an issue and must be specified in the UTF-16 protocol, such as with a byte-order mark (BOM).

- If an odd number of bytes is missing from UTF-16, the whole rest of the string will be meaningless text. Any bytes missing from UTF-8 will still allow the text to be recovered accurately starting with the next character after the missing bytes.

## Implementations and adoption

UTF-8 has been the most common encoding for the World Wide Web since 2008. As of September 2024, UTF-8 is used by 98.3% of surveyed web sites. Although many pages only use ASCII characters to display content, very few websites now declare their encoding to only be ASCII instead of UTF-8. Over 50% of the languages tracked have 100% UTF-8 use.

Many standards only support UTF-8, e.g. JSON exchange requires it (without a byte-order mark (BOM)). UTF-8 is also the recommendation from the WHATWG for HTML and DOM specifications, and stating "UTF-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode " and the Internet Mail Consortium recommends that all e‑mail programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8. The World Wide Web Consortium recommends UTF-8 as the default encoding in XML and HTML (and not just using UTF-8, also declaring it in metadata), "even when all characters are in the ASCII range... Using non-UTF-8 encodings can have unexpected results".

Lots of software has the ability to read/write UTF-8. It may though require the user to change options from the normal settings, or may require a BOM (byte-order mark) as the first character to read the file. Examples of software supporting UTF-8 include Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel (2016 and later), Google Drive, LibreOffice and most databases.

Some software can only read and write UTF-8 (or at least does not require a BOM). Windows Notepad, in all currently supported versions of Windows, defaults to writing UTF-8 without a BOM (a change from the outdated / unsupported Windows 7 Notepad), bringing it into line with most other text editors. Some system files on Windows 11 require UTF-8 with no requirement for a BOM, and almost all files on macOS and Linux are required to be UTF-8 without a BOM. Java 18 defaults to reading and writing files as UTF-8, and in older versions (e.g. LTS versions) only the NIO API was changed to do so. Many other programming languages default to UTF-8 for I/O, including Ruby 3.0 and R 4.2.2. All current versions of Python support UTF-8 for I/O, even on Windows (where it is opt-in for the open() function), and plans exist to make UTF-8 I/O the default in Python 3.15 on all platforms. C++23 adopts UTF-8 as the only portable source code file format (surprisingly there was none before).

Backwards compatibility is a serious impediment to changing code to use UTF-8 instead of a 16-bit encoding, but this is happening. The default string primitive in Go, Julia, Rust, Swift 5, and PyPy uses UTF-8 internally in all cases. Python 3.3 uses UTF-8 internally for Python C API extensions and sometimes for strings and a future version of Python is planned to store strings as UTF-8 by default. Modern versions of Microsoft Visual Studio use UTF-8 internally. Microsoft's SQL Server 2019 added support for UTF-8, and using it results in a 35% speed increase, and "nearly 50% reduction in storage requirements."

All currently supported Windows versions support UTF-8 in some way (including Xbox); partial support has existed since at least Windows XP. As of May 2019, Microsoft has reversed its previous position of only recommending UTF-16; the capability to set UTF-8 as the "code page" for the Windows API was introduced; and Microsoft recommends programmers use UTF-8, and even states "UTF-16 is a unique burden that Windows places on code that targets multiple platforms".

The Java programming language includes Modified UTF-8 (MUTF-8), in which the null character (U+0000) uses the two-byte overlong encoding 110 00000 10 000000 (hexadecimal C0 80), instead of 00000000 (hexadecimal 00). Modified UTF-8 strings never contain any actual null bytes but can contain all Unicode code points including U+0000, which allows such strings (with a null byte appended) to be processed by traditional null-terminated string functions. All known Modified UTF-8 implementations also treat the surrogate pairs as in CESU-8. In normal usage, the language supports standard UTF-8 when reading and writing strings through InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter (if it is the platform's default character set or as requested by the program). However it uses Modified UTF-8 for object serialization among other applications of DataInput and DataOutput, for the Java Native Interface, and for embedding constant strings in class files. The dex format defined by Dalvik also uses the same modified UTF-8 to represent string values. Tcl also uses the same modified UTF-8 as Java for internal representation of Unicode data, but uses strict CESU-8 for external data.

Version 3 of the Python programming language treats each byte of an invalid UTF-8 bytestream as an error (see also changes with new UTF-8 mode in Python 3.7); this gives 128 different possible errors. Extensions have been created to allow any byte sequence that is assumed to be UTF-8 to be losslessly transformed to UTF-16 or UTF-32, by translating the 128 possible error bytes to reserved code points, and transforming those code points back to error bytes to output UTF-8. The most common approach is to translate the codes to U+DC80...U+DCFF which are low (trailing) surrogate values and thus "invalid" UTF-16, as used by Python 's PEP 383 (or "surrogateescape") approach. Another encoding called MirBSD OPTU-8/16 converts them to U+EF80...U+EFFF in a Private Use Area. In either approach, the byte value is encoded in the low eight bits of the output code point. These encodings are very useful because they avoid the need to deal with "invalid" byte strings until much later, if at all, and allow "text" and "data" byte arrays to be the same object. If a program wants to use UTF-16 internally these are required to preserve and use filenames that can use invalid UTF-8; as the Windows filesystem API uses UTF-16, the need to support invalid UTF-8 is less there. For the encoding to be reversible, the standard UTF-8 encodings of the code points used for erroneous bytes must be considered invalid. This makes the encoding incompatible with WTF-8 or CESU-8 (though only for 128 code points). When re-encoding it is necessary to be careful of sequences of error code points which convert back to valid UTF-8, which may be used by malicious software to get unexpected characters in the output, though this cannot produce ASCII characters so it is considered comparatively safe, since malicious sequences (such as cross-site scripting) usually rely on ASCII characters.

## Standards

There are several current definitions of UTF-8 in various standards documents:

- RFC 3629 / STD 63 (2003), which establishes UTF-8 as a standard internet protocol element

- RFC 5198 defines UTF-8 NFC for Network Interchange (2008)

- ISO/IEC 10646:2014 §9.1 (2014)

- The Unicode Standard, Version 15.0.0 (2022)

They supersede the definitions given in the following obsolete works:

- The Unicode Standard, Version 2.0, Appendix A (1996)

- ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 Amendment 2 / Annex R (1996)

- RFC 2044 (1996)

- RFC 2279 (1998)

- The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0, §2.3 (2000) plus Corrigendum #1 : UTF-8 Shortest Form (2000)

- Unicode Standard Annex #27: Unicode 3.1 (2001)

- The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0 (2006)

- The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0 (2010)

They are all the same in their general mechanics, with the main differences being on issues such as allowed range of code point values and safe handling of invalid input.


Flexoelectricity

# Flexoelectricity

## Abstract

Flexoelectricity is a property of a dielectric material where there is coupling between electrical polarization and a strain gradient. Flexoelectricity is closely related to piezoelectricity, but while piezoelectricity refers to polarization due to uniform strain, flexoelectricity refers specifically to polarization due to strain that changes from point to point in the material. This nonuniform strain breaks centrosymmetry, meaning that unlike in piezoelectricity, flexoelectric effects occur in both centrosymmetric and asymmetric crystal structures. Flexoelectricity is not the same as Ferroelasticity. Flexoelectricity plays a critical role in explaining many interesting electromechanical behaviors in hard crystalline materials and core mechanoelectric transduction phenomena in soft biomaterials. Most excitingly, flexoelectricity is a size-dependent effect that becomes more significant in nanoscale systems, such as crack tips.

In common useage flexoelectricity is the generation of polarization due to a strain gradient; inverse flexoectricity is when polarization, often due to an applied electric field, generates a strain gradient. Converse flexoelectricity is where a polarization gradient induces strain in a material.

The electric polarization P i {\displaystyle P_{i}} due to mechanical strain of ϵ i j {\displaystyle \epsilon _{ij}} in a dielectric is given by

where the first term corresponds to the direct piezoelectric effect and the second term corresponds to the flexoelectric polarization induced by the strain gradient.

Here, the flexoelectric coefficient, μ i j k l {\displaystyle \mu _{ijkl}}, is a fourth-rank polar tensor and e i j k {\displaystyle e_{ijk}} is the coefficient corresponding to the direct piezoelectric effect.