What is the standard for UNICODE encoding?

UNICODE is the standard for internationalization, but not all platforms/systems use the same UNICODE character set / encoding.

Recent UNIX™ distributions define UTF-8 as the default character set locale, XML files are UTF-8 by default, while Microsoft™ Windows® standard character encoding is UTF-16 (NTFS) / UCS-2 (SQL Server). Recent Microsoft Windows 10 updates support UTF-8 as system locale for non-Unicode applications (in beta stage while writing these lines).

Genero BDL supports UTF-8 and this is the encoding that must be used with implement UNICODE applications.

Important:

Files encoded in UTF-8 can start with the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM), a sequence of 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF bytes, also known as UNICODE U+FEFF. When reading files, Genero BDL will ignore the UTF-8 BOM, if it is present at the beginning of the file. This applies to instructions such as LOAD, as well as I/O APIs such as base.Channel.read() and readLine().