What UTF-8 means?

Table of Contents

UCS Transformation Format 8
UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format 8) is the World Wide Web’s most common character encoding. Each character is represented by one to four bytes. UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII and can represent any standard Unicode character.

Why is it called UTF-16?

The encoding is variable-length, as code points are encoded with one or two 16-bit code units. UTF-16 arose from an earlier obsolete fixed-width 16-bit encoding, now known as UCS-2 (for 2-byte Universal Character Set), once it became clear that more than 216 (65,536) code points were needed.

What is UTF-8?

v. t. e. UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from Unicode (or Universal Coded Character Set) Transformation Format – 8-bit. UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to four one- byte (8-bit) code units.

What is the difference between UTF-8 and ASCII?

UTF-8 encoded text is larger than specialized single-byte encodings except for plain ASCII characters. In the case of scripts which used 8-bit character sets with non-Latin characters encoded in the upper half (such as most Cyrillic and Greek alphabet code pages), characters in UTF-8 will be double the size.

Why UTF-8 is the default character encoding in XML?

The World Wide Web Consortium recommends UTF-8 as the default encoding in XML and HTML (and not just using UTF-8, also stating it in metadata), “even when all characters are in the ASCII range.. Using non-UTF-8 encodings can have unexpected results”. Many other standards only support UTF-8, e.g. open JSON exchange requires it.

What is the Unicode code point for UTF-8 (hex)?

Unicode code point UTF-8 (hex.) U+0000 00 U+0001 01 U+0002 02 U+0003 03