UTF-8

lastmod 2018-11-25created 2014-03-177 edits

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode, created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. UTF-8 stands for Universal Coded Character Set + Transformation Format – 8-bit. It was originally proposed under the name FSS-UTF (File System Safe UCS/Unicode Transformation Format).

UTF-8 encoding uses 1 to 4 bytes to represent a single Unicode character. For example, ASCII characters in the range U+0000 to U+007F are represented with only 1 byte in UTF-8. Characters represented with 4 bytes are all Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), and are rarely used. Whether UTF-16 or UTF-8 uses fewer bytes depends on the code points used in the string, and in practice, when a common compression algorithm such as DEFLATE is used, the difference is negligible. When such compression algorithms are hard to use and size matters, the Standard Compression Scheme for Unicode can be used instead.

UTF8 Charater Encoding

See also

• Unicode (Unicode block)
• UTF-16
• UTF-32

Favorite site

• Wikipedia (en) UTF-8
• Unicode (UTF-8) Hangul code chart ¹
• [Recommended] KLDP: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux users ²
• [Recommended] UTF-8 Everywhere ³

References