UTF8enkoodaus

UTF8enkoodaus, known internationally as UTF-8, is a variable-width character encoding standard used for electronic communication. It is capable of encoding all possible Unicode characters. Developed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, UTF-8 was designed to be backward compatible with ASCII, meaning that any valid ASCII text is also valid UTF-8 text. This compatibility was a significant factor in its widespread adoption.

The encoding works by using between one and four bytes to represent each character. ASCII characters, which are the first 128 Unicode characters, are represented by a single byte, identical to their ASCII representation. Characters outside of the ASCII range are represented by sequences of two, three, or four bytes. This variable-width nature makes UTF-8 efficient for storing and transmitting text that primarily consists of English characters, while still accommodating the vast range of characters found in other languages.

UTF-8's design also includes a self-synchronizing property. This means that if a part of the byte stream is lost or corrupted, it is often possible to resynchronize and decode the remaining valid characters without needing to restart from the beginning. This robustness contributes to its reliability in various data transmission scenarios. Due to its efficiency, backward compatibility, and ability to represent any character, UTF-8 has become the dominant encoding for the World Wide Web and is widely used in many operating systems, programming languages, and file formats.