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It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that a UTF-8-encoded file using only those characters is identical to an ASCII file.
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 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.
As of Unicode version 16.0, there are 155,063 characters with code points, covering 168 modern and historical scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets.This article includes the 1,062 characters in the Multilingual European Character Set 2 subset, and some additional related characters.
While ASCII is limited to 128 characters, Unicode and the UCS support more characters by separating the concepts of unique identification (using natural numbers called code points) and encoding (to 8-, 16-, or 32-bit binary formats, called UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, respectively).
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.
The Basic Latin Unicode block, [3] sometimes informally called C0 Controls and Basic Latin, [4] is the first block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in UTF-8. The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding.
Over time, character encodings capable of representing more characters were created, such as ASCII, the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings, various computer vendor encodings, and Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. The most popular character encoding on the World Wide Web is UTF-8, which is used in 98.2% of surveyed web sites, as of May 2024. [2]