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UTF-8

UTF-8 is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters, or code points, defined by Unicode and originally designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. The encoding is variable-length and uses 8-bit code units. It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII and to avoid the complications of endianness and byte order marks in the alternative UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings. The name is derived from Unicode (or Universal Coded Character Set) Transformation Format – 8-bit. UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for 88.7% of all Web pages in March 2017 (the most popular East Asian encodings, Shift JIS and GB 2312, have 1.0% and 0.7% respectively). The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) recommended that all email programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8, and the W3C recommends UTF-8 as the default encoding in XML and HTML.