Glossary Data & Encoding

UTF-8

UTF-8 is the dominant Unicode encoding, writing each character as one to four bytes and staying identical to ASCII for the first 128 characters.

Last reviewed: 2026-10-03

In more detail

Because it is variable-length, a string's byte count is not its character count: é takes two bytes and most emoji take four. It is the default for the web, JSON and most modern software.

Example

A is 41, é is C3 A9 and € is E2 82 AC. See every character's bytes with Unicode Character Inspector.

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Unicode Character Inspector

Paste text to see every character's code point, general category, script, UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 code units and escapes for JavaScript.

In more detail

Example

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Unicode Character Inspector

See also