UTF-8
What is UTF-8?
UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding standard. It is designed under the Unicode standard to represent text data in a compact and backward-compatible way. In UTF-8 format, code points (which Unicode uses to map characters) are translated into one to four bytes.
UTF-8 format is also compatible with ASCII, and many text files today use it by default. UTF-8 represents all writing systems in a unified encoding standard across different systems. This way, we don’t need to rely on legacy code pages or encoding formats.
How to Use UTF-8 in Webpages
You need to declare UTF-8 encoding in HTML to ensure your pages render correctly. Typically, we add the following in the <head> section:
<meta charset=”utf-8″>
This setting tells the browser the page uses the UTF-8 format. Without this setting, characters beyond ASCII may break, or they won’t render properly.
UTF-8 supports a wide range of character sets. Thus, web standards like HTML5 use it by default. When working with text data, you should consistently use UTF-8 characters so your site can properly handle Unicode across languages.
Compared to UTF-16, the UTF-8 format is more space-efficient for texts rich in ASCII characters.
How UTF-8 Encoding Works
In UTF-8 encoding, each code point or point value (a number assigned by Unicode) becomes a byte sequence of 1 to 4 bytes. The first byte in that sequence indicates how many total bytes will follow. For example:
- For code points 0–127, a single byte is enough.
- Code points that are larger use byte sequences. The first byte begins with bits like 110, 1110, or 11110, indicating 2, 3, or 4 bytes.
- The next bytes always begin with 10 to indicate continuation.
This valid UTF-8 characters scheme prevents overlap. Because the first byte signals the sequence length, decoders can parse without confusion.
Examples of UTF-8 in HTML tags
Below is an HTML5 coding example:
| <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang=”en”> <head> <meta charset=”UTF-8″> <title> Example</title> </head> <body> <p>Some English text</p> </body> </html> |
The <meta charset> tag ensures those characters map correctly. It’s recommended to use standard encodings so browsers interpret the same byte sequences as the same characters