UTF-8 stands for Unicode Transformation Format - 8-bit. It is a variable-width character encoding used for electronic communication. UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid Unicode code points using one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units¹.

How UTF-8 Works

UTF-8 encodes characters into one to four bytes, depending on the character's code point. 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. This means that any valid ASCII text is also valid UTF-8-encoded text¹.

For example, the Unicode code point for the euro sign (€) is U+20AC. In UTF-8, this character is encoded using three bytes: E2 82 AC. The encoding process involves distributing bits from the code point among the UTF-8 bytes and adding additional bits as required by the UTF-8 standard¹.

UTF-8's Advantages