UTF-8

Definitions

1. A variable-width character encoding that represents every Unicode code point using one to four bytes, designed to be backward-compatible with ASCII (all valid ASCII is valid UTF-8). It is the dominant encoding on the web, used by over 98% of websites.

   In plain English: The most widely used system for storing text in computers, capable of representing virtually every character from every language in the world.

   Example: "The CSV import broke because the vendor sent us Latin-1 and we assumed UTF-8, so every accented character turned into garbage."

Related Terms

• EBCDIC
• Parse
• String
• Base64
• Regex
• Unicode
• Bit Field
• Character Set