Text - UCS-N vs. UTF-N

UCS-N and UTF-N are character encodings for Unicode.

A character encoding is an algorithm that converts a code point to a sequence of bytes that can be included in a document.

UCS-N : These are fixed-width character encodings.

UCS-2 stands for Unicode Character Set coded in 2 octets.
UCS-2 is a fixed-width 2-byte character encoding. It was the predecessor to the variable-width encoding UTF-16.

UCS-4 stands for Unicode Character Set coded in 4 octets.
UCS-4 is a fixed-width 4-byte character encoding.

UTF-N : These are variable-width and fixed-width character encocodings.

UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format.
UTF-8 is a variable-width: 1,2,3 or 4-byte character encoding.
UTF-16 is a variable-width: 2-byte or 4-byte character encoding.
UTF-32 is a fixed-width: 4-byte character encoding.

The term UCS (on it's own, with no suffix), is short for Universal Character Set. It represents all of the characters in the Unicode standard.

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