What is UTF-8?

UTF-8 is a variable-width Unicode character encoding scheme. UTF-8 stands for Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit. It is the most popular character encoding on the World Wide Web.

Each character in the Unicode character set is assigned a unique value called a code point. UTF-8 represents these code points as a single byte or sequence of bytes, allowing a computer to understand and use them.

Since Unicode contains the characters for most of the world's written languages, UTF-8 allows computers to display text from multiple languages with a single encoding. This makes the localization of software and Web pages much easier.