UTF8encoded

UTF8encoded refers to text that has been encoded using UTF-8, the widely adopted transformation format for Unicode. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding that represents Unicode code points using one to four bytes. It is ASCII-compatible, meaning that the first 128 code points (the basic Latin characters) map to the same one-byte values as ASCII, which helps with interoperability and backwards compatibility.

The encoding was designed in the late 1980s and published as a standard in the Unicode community, with formal documentation in the early UTF-8 standards. It was created to unify different encodings existing on systems and networks and to work well with existing software and protocols. UTF-8 can encode all valid Unicode code points, up to U+10FFFF, and is designed to be monolithic across endianness, avoiding byte order issues common to other Unicode encodings.

In UTF-8, a single-byte code point has the form 0xxxxxxx, a two-byte sequence starts with 110xxxxx followed by 10xxxxxx, a three-byte sequence starts with 1110xxxx followed by two continuation bytes, and a four-byte sequence starts with 11110xxx followed by three continuation bytes. Continuation bytes always begin with 10. Overlong encodings and certain malformed sequences are considered invalid by well-implemented decoders, which helps protect against some security issues.

UTF-8 is the dominant encoding on the web and is widely supported in programming languages, databases, and communications protocols. Text described as UTF-8 encoded is portable across platforms, though the presence of a Byte Order Mark is optional and can cause issues for some parsers. Proper handling includes declaring charset in web content and validating/normalizing input data to prevent decoding errors.