.Dd April 29, 2026
.Dt SQLITE_UTF8 3
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm SQLITE_UTF8 ,
.Nm SQLITE_UTF16LE ,
.Nm SQLITE_UTF16BE ,
.Nm SQLITE_UTF16 ,
.Nm SQLITE_ANY ,
.Nm SQLITE_UTF16_ALIGNED ,
.Nm SQLITE_UTF8_ZT
.Nd text encodings
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.In sqlite3.h
.Fd #define SQLITE_UTF8
.Fd #define SQLITE_UTF16LE
.Fd #define SQLITE_UTF16BE
.Fd #define SQLITE_UTF16
.Fd #define SQLITE_ANY
.Fd #define SQLITE_UTF16_ALIGNED
.Fd #define SQLITE_UTF8_ZT
.Sh DESCRIPTION
These constants define integer codes that represent the various text
encodings supported by SQLite.
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It SQLITE_UTF8
Text is encoding as UTF-8
.It SQLITE_UTF16LE
Text is encoding as UTF-16 with each code point being expressed "little
endian" - the least significant byte first.
This is the usual encoding, for example on Windows.
.It SQLITE_UTF16BE
Text is encoding as UTF-16 with each code point being expressed "big
endian" - the most significant byte first.
This encoding is less common, but is still sometimes seen, specially
on older systems.
.It SQLITE_UTF16
Text is encoding as UTF-16 with each code point being expressed either
little endian or as big endian, according to the native endianness
of the host computer.
.It SQLITE_ANY
This encoding value may only be used to declare the preferred text
for application-defined SQL functions
created using
.Fn sqlite3_create_function
and similar.
If the preferred encoding (the 4th parameter to sqlite3_create_function()
- the eTextRep parameter) is SQLITE_ANY, that indicates that the function
does not have a preference regarding the text encoding of its parameters
and can take any text encoding that the SQLite core find convenient
to supply.
This option is deprecated.
Please do not use it in new applications.
.It SQLITE_UTF16_ALIGNED
This encoding value may be used as the 3rd parameter (the eTextRep
parameter) to
.Fn sqlite3_create_collation
and similar.
This encoding value means that the application-defined collating sequence
created expects its input strings to be in UTF16 in native byte order,
and that the start of the strings must be aligned to a 2-byte boundary.
.It SQLITE_UTF8_ZT
This option can only be used to specify the text encoding to strings
input to
.Fn sqlite3_result_text64
and
.Fn sqlite3_bind_text64 .
The SQLITE_UTF8_ZT encoding means that the input string (call it "z")
is UTF-8 encoded and that it is zero-terminated.
If the length parameter (call it "n") is non-negative, this encoding
option means that the caller guarantees that z array contains at least
n+1 bytes and that the z[n] byte has a value of zero.
This option gives the same output as SQLITE_UTF8, but can be more efficient
by avoiding the need to make a copy of the input string, in some cases.
However, if z is allocated to hold fewer than n+1 bytes or if the z[n]
byte is not zero, undefined behavior may result.
.El
.Pp
.Sh IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
These declarations were extracted from the
interface documentation at line 5825.
.Bd -literal
#define SQLITE_UTF8           1    /* IMP: R-37514-35566 */
#define SQLITE_UTF16LE        2    /* IMP: R-03371-37637 */
#define SQLITE_UTF16BE        3    /* IMP: R-51971-34154 */
#define SQLITE_UTF16          4    /* Use native byte order */
#define SQLITE_ANY            5    /* Deprecated */
#define SQLITE_UTF16_ALIGNED  8    /* sqlite3_create_collation only */
#define SQLITE_UTF8_ZT       16    /* Zero-terminated UTF8 */
.Ed
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr sqlite3_bind_blob 3 ,
.Xr sqlite3_create_collation 3 ,
.Xr sqlite3_create_function 3 ,
.Xr sqlite3_result_blob 3