UTF-8 is a brilliant design
UTF-8 is a Brilliant Design 2025-09-12 The first time I learned about UTF-8 encoding, I was fascinated by how well-thought and brilliantly it was designed to represent millions of characters from different languages and scripts, and still be backward compatible with ASCII. Basically UTF-8 uses 32 bits and the old ASCII uses 7 bits, but UTF-8 is designed in such a way that: Every ASCII encoded file is a valid UTF-8 file. Every UTF-8 encoded file that has only ASCII characters is a valid ASCII file. Designing a system that scales to millions of characters and still be compatible with the old systems that use just 128 characters is a brilliant design. Note: If you are already aware of the UTF-8 encoding, you can explore the UTF-8 Playground utility that I built to visualize UTF-8…
