UTF-8
What does UTF-8 mean?
Definition
UTF-8 is a character encoding standard that is used to represent text data in computers. It is a variable-width encoding, which means that it uses between 1 and 4 bytes to represent each character. UTF-8 is the most widely used character encoding standard for the web and is supported by the vast majority of web browsers, email clients, and other software applications.
One of the benefits of UTF-8 is that it supports all Unicode characters, including characters from multiple scripts and languages, as well as symbols and emoji. This makes UTF-8 an ideal choice for the global and multilingual computing industry. UTF-8 is also backwards-compatible with ASCII, the character encoding standard commonly used in English-language text, as the first 128 code points of Unicode are the same as ASCII.
Another advantage of UTF-8 is that it is an efficient encoding, using a minimum of 1 byte to represent each ASCII character, and using additional bytes for non-ASCII characters. This makes UTF-8 well-suited for the storage and transmission of text data, as well as for the processing of text data in software applications.
In short, UTF-8 is a widely used character encoding standard that supports all Unicode characters, is backwards-compatible with ASCII, and is an efficient and flexible encoding for the storage, transmission, and processing of text data.