How is UTF-32 different from UTF-16 and UTF-8?

UTF-32 uses a fixed four bytes for every code point, so indexing is trivial but it wastes space for ASCII. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable width and far more compact for typical text, which is why UTF-32 is rare outside internal processing.

Why does each character take exactly four bytes?

Unicode code points range up to U+10FFFF, which fits in 21 bits. UTF-32 rounds that up to a fixed 32-bit (four-byte) unit per code point, so every character is the same width regardless of value.

How are emoji handled?

An emoji is a single code point above U+FFFF. The tool reads it as one code point using the string iterator (which combines surrogate pairs) and encodes it as one four-byte UTF-32 value, not two.

What is the difference between LE and BE here?

Little-endian writes the four bytes least-significant first; big-endian writes most-significant first. U+0041 is 41 00 00 00 in LE and 00 00 00 41 in BE. The code point value is identical, only byte order differs.

Does the output include a BOM?

No. The viewer shows only the encoded text. A UTF-32 file may begin with FF FE 00 00 (LE) or 00 00 FE FF (BE) as a byte order mark, which you would add separately.

UTF-32 Hex Viewer — Gera Tools

UTF-32 is the simplest Unicode encoding: every code point is stored as a fixed four-byte value. This viewer expands any text into that fixed-width byte stream in hexadecimal, in either little-endian or big-endian order.

How it works

The tool iterates over the string by Unicode code point (using the string iterator, which correctly joins surrogate pairs into a single value above U+FFFF). Each code point cp is split into four bytes:

b0 =  cp        & 0xFF   (least significant)
b1 = (cp >> 8)  & 0xFF
b2 = (cp >> 16) & 0xFF
b3 = (cp >> 24) & 0xFF
LE = b0 b1 b2 b3
BE = b3 b2 b1 b0

Because the value never exceeds U+10FFFF, the most significant byte is always 00, but UTF-32 still reserves all four bytes for alignment and fixed indexing.

Example and notes

The letter A (U+0041) becomes 41 00 00 00 in little-endian or 00 00 00 41 in big-endian. A rocket emoji (U+1F680) becomes the single value 80 F6 01 00 in little-endian — one code point, four bytes — whereas in UTF-16 the same character would need a two-unit surrogate pair. UTF-32 is convenient for indexing because character count always equals byte count divided by four.