What is UTF-8 Encoding? A Guide for Non-Programmers

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was an early standardized encoding system for text.

ASCII’s library includes every upper-case and lower-case letter in the Latin alphabet, every digit from 0 to 9, and some symbols (like /, !, and ?). It assigns each of these characters a unique three-digit code and a unique byte.

But ASCII is so limited, it gives us 256 different bytes, or 256 ways to represent a character. When ASCII was introduced in 1960, this was okay, since developers needed only 128 bytes to represent all the English characters and symbols they needed.

Enter Unicode, an encoding system that solves the space issue of ASCII. Like ASCII, Unicode assigns a unique code, called a code point, to each character. However, Unicode’s more sophisticated system can produce over a million code points, more than enough to account for every character in any language.

UTF-8 is an encoding system for Unicode. It can translate any Unicode character to a matching unique binary string, and can also translate the binary string back to a Unicode character.

UTF-8 is currently the most popular encoding method on the internet because it can efficiently store text containing any character.