UTF8enkodointia

UTF-8 encoding, also known as Unicode Transformation Format - 8-bit, is a variable-width character encoding used for electronic communication. It is capable of encoding all valid character points in Unicode using one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units. UTF-8 is designed to be backward compatible with ASCII and is the dominant encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for over 95% of all web pages.

UTF-8 was developed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike in 1992. It is a superset of ASCII, meaning that all ASCII characters are valid UTF-8 sequences. This makes it particularly useful for text that contains both ASCII and non-ASCII characters. UTF-8 is also self-synchronizing, meaning that it can be parsed from left to right without needing to know the length of the encoded string in advance.

The encoding process in UTF-8 involves mapping Unicode code points to one or more bytes. The first 128 Unicode code points (U+0000 to U+007F) are encoded as single bytes, which are identical to their ASCII equivalents. Code points from U+0080 to U+07FF are encoded as two bytes, and those from U+0800 to U+FFFF are encoded as three bytes. Code points from U+10000 to U+10FFFF are encoded as four bytes.

UTF-8 is widely supported by modern software and hardware, making it a practical choice for encoding text in a variety of applications. Its efficiency, compatibility, and robustness have contributed to its widespread adoption as the standard encoding for Unicode text.