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A UTF-8 file that contains only ASCII characters is identical to an ASCII file. Legacy programs can generally handle UTF-8 encoded files, even if they contain non-ASCII characters. For instance, the C printf function can print a UTF-8 string because it only looks for the ASCII '%' character to define a formatting string. All other bytes are ...
UTF-8 is also the recommendation from the WHATWG for HTML and DOM specifications, and stating "UTF-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode" [4] and the Internet Mail Consortium recommends that all e‑mail programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8.
ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, and the original 7-bit ASCII were the most common character encoding methods on the World Wide Web until 2008, when UTF-8 overtook them. [57] ISO/IEC 4873 introduced 32 additional control codes defined in the 80–9F hexadecimal range, as part of extending the 7-bit ASCII encoding to become an 8-bit system. [63]
UTF-8 uses one to four 8-bit units (bytes) per code point and, being compact for Latin scripts and ASCII-compatible, provides the de facto standard encoding for the interchange of Unicode text. It is used by FreeBSD and most recent Linux distributions as a direct replacement for legacy encodings in general text handling.
The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (plus amendments to that standard), which is the basis of many character encodings, improving as characters from previously unrepresented typing systems are added.
Microsoft was one of the first companies to implement Unicode in their products. Windows NT was the first operating system that used "wide characters" in system calls.Using the (now obsolete) UCS-2 encoding scheme at first, it was upgraded to the variable-width encoding UTF-16 starting with Windows 2000, allowing a representation of additional planes with surrogate pairs.
It is increasingly common for multilingual websites and websites in non-Western languages to use UTF-8, which allows use of the same encoding for all languages. UTF-16 or UTF-32, which can be used for all languages as well, are less widely used because they can be harder to handle in programming languages that assume a byte-oriented ASCII ...
The default string primitive used in newer programing languages, such as Go, [22] Julia, Rust and Swift 5, [23] assume UTF-8 encoding. PyPy is also using UTF-8 for its strings, [24] and Python is looking into storing all strings with UTF-8. [25] Microsoft now recommends the use of UTF-8 for applications using the Windows API, while continuing ...