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UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding on the web, capable of representing every Unicode character using 1 to 4 bytes. It is backward-compatible with ASCII, meaning standard English characters use just one byte each. Over 98% of all web pages use UTF-8, making it the universal standard for text encoding in modern applications.
UTF-8 uses a variable number of bytes per character: ASCII characters (A-Z, 0-9) use 1 byte, accented Latin characters use 2 bytes, CJK characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) use 3 bytes, and emoji or rare scripts use 4 bytes. Understanding this helps debug string length vs. byte length discrepancies in code.
UTF-8 is the web standard using 1-4 bytes per character and is ASCII-compatible, while UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes and is common in Windows and Java internals. UTF-8 is more space-efficient for Latin-based text, while UTF-16 can be more compact for CJK-heavy content. Choose UTF-8 for web and file interchange.
