A family of encoding standards used to represent and store text in computer systems. UTF encodings are designed to cover the full range of Unicode characters, which includes characters from virtually every written language, as well as symbols, punctuation, and special characters.
The UTF family consists of different encoding schemes, each optimized for specific use cases:
- UTF-8: This is the most commonly used encoding on the web. It uses a variable-length encoding, meaning each character can be represented by one to four bytes. UTF-8 is compatible with ASCII and is efficient in terms of space, especially for languages with a smaller character set, like English.
- UTF-16: This encoding uses either two or four bytes per character. UTF-16 is widely used in environments that need to handle large numbers of characters, such as Microsoft Windows. It provides a balance between efficient storage and broad Unicode support.
- UTF-32: UTF-32 uses a fixed-width encoding, representing each character by four bytes. This makes character handling straightforward but requires more storage space, making it less efficient for applications where storage is a concern.
These UTF encodings allow seamless text representation across different systems and languages, providing the foundation for global text communication and data exchange.
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