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UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit. [1] Almost every webpage is stored in UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,064 [2] valid code points using a variable-width encoding of one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units.
Text with variable-length encoding such as UTF-8 or UTF-16 is harder to process if there is a need to work with individual code units as opposed to working with code points. Searching is unaffected by whether the characters are variably sized since a search for a sequence of code units does not care about the divisions.
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 ...
This character-encoding scheme is used throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. It is the basis for some popular 8-bit character sets and the first two blocks of characters in Unicode. As of December 2024, 1.1% of all web sites use ISO/IEC 8859-1.
Vendors that use a code page system allocate their own code page number to a character encoding, even if it is better known by another name; for example, UTF-8 has been assigned page numbers 1208 at IBM, 65001 at Microsoft, and 4110 at SAP.
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]
Unicode also adopted UTF-16, but in Unicode terminology, the high-half zone elements become "high surrogates" and the low-half zone elements become "low surrogates". [clarification needed] Another encoding, UTF-32 (previously named UCS-4), uses four bytes (total 32 bits) to encode a single character of the codespace. UTF-32 thereby permits a ...
UTF-8 parts, known as U-Labels, are transformed into A-Labels via an ad-hoc method called IDNA. For example, sörensen.example.com is encoded as xn--srensen-90a.example.com. In 2003, when the need was addressed, that seemed easier than checking that all DNS software could comply with UTF-8 strings, although in theory DNS can transport binary data.