UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8-bit)

• It's a variable-width character encoding for Unicode. It can represent every grapheme in the Unicode standard using one to four bytes.
• ASCII characters are represented in UTF-8 with a single byte, which maintains compatibility with ASCII.
• Grapheme from other scripts and symbols are represented with more bytes as needed.
• Thus, it's very efficient in handling English text while still supporting a wide range of international characters.

Encoding

Some of the challenges UTF-8 wanted to solve:

1. In English it's necessary to get hid of all the zeros an ASCII character has when represented in UTF-32.
2. Old computers interpret eight zeros in a row (NULL character) as this is the end of a string.
3. Be backwards compatible.

• For ASCII it just adds a leading 0.
  • ASCII: 1000001 -> A
  • UTF-8: 01000001 -> A
• Null character is encoding as all zero: 0000000.
  • There is a modified UTF-8 to deal with this.

For others: