Unicode
Unicode is a standard to encode text. It assigns unique code points to characters.
- Latin letter βAβ: U+0041
- Arabic numeral β5β: U+0035
- Greek letter βΞ±β (alpha): U+03B1
- Chinese character βζ±β (han): U+6C49
- Mathematical symbol βΞ£β (sigma): U+03A3
- Emoji βπβ (smiling face with smiling eyes): U+1F60A
βU+β means itβs a unicode code point in hex
UTF-8
- UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format.
- The β8β means it uses 8-bit blocks to represent a character
- The number of blocks needed to represent a character varies from 1 to 4.
- utf8 uses just 1 byte for ASCII, and up to 4 bytes for non-ascii
| Byte 1 | Byte 2 | Byte 3 | Byte 4 | Free Bits | Max Unicode Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0xxxxxxx | Β | Β | Β | 7 | 2^7-1 |
| 110xxxxx | 10xxxxxx | Β | Β | (5+6)=11 | 2^11-1 |
| 1110xxxx | 10xxxxxx | 10xxxxxx | Β | (4+6+6)=16 | 2^16-1 |
| 11110xxx | 10xxxxxx | 10xxxxxx | 10xxxxxx | (3+6+6+6)=21 | 2^21-1 = 1 114 111 |