Decoding the World of UTF-8 Encoding

In the internet world, the text is king. Every website uses this in some form, whether it has to do with URLs, blog posts, tweets, etc. Today, thousands of languages are spoken today, or all the punctuation and symbols we can add to enhance them, or new emojis are being created to capture every human emotion. How do websites store and process all of this? So in this article, we will discuss all things related to text storage and encoding and discuss how it helps put engaging words across your site.

So get ready to dive into some computer science stuff.

What Is UTF-8?

UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format. It is a family of standards for encoding the Unicode character set into its equivalent binary value. I know currently, it’s not making sense. So let’s roll back to the basics.

How is Data in a Computer Stored?

All the data in Computers is stored in binary form, which consists of 0’s and 1’s. The most basic binary unit is a bit, which is just a single 1 or 0. The next largest binary unit is a byte, which consists of 8 bits. For example, we can represent the number 254 in binary like “11111110”.

So every digital thing which we have used in our day-to-day life is built on a system of bytes, which are joined together in a way that makes sense to computers. Computers store and process a lot of information, including text. Text is made up of individual characters, each of which has a string of bits that are assembled to form digital words, paragraphs, etc.

Before jumping to UTF-8 directly we should cover some basics.

Data Store in Binary Format

What is character encoding, and why should I care?

If you use anything other than the most basic English text, people may not be able to read the content you create unless you use character encoding.

For example, you may intend the text to look like this:

but it may actually display like this:

Not only does a lack of character encoding information spoil the readability of displayed text, but it may mean that your data cannot be found by a search engine, or reliably processed by machines in a number of other ways.

Words and sentences in text are created from characters. Examples of characters include the Latin letter á or the Devanagari character ह. Characters that are needed for a specific purpose are grouped into a character set. The characters are stored in the computer as one or more bytes.

So character encoding provides a set of mappings between the bytes in the computer and the characters in the character set. So, when you input text using a keyboard or in some other way, the character encoding maps characters you choose to specific bytes in computer memory, and then to display the text it reads the bytes back into characters.

Common examples of character encoding systems include Morse code, the Baudot code, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), and Unicode.

ASCII: Converting Symbols to Binary

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was an early most common standardized character encoding format for text data in computers and on the internet.

Characters in ASCII encoding include upper- and lowercase letters A through Z, numerals 0 through 9, and basic punctuation symbols. It also uses some non-printing control characters that were originally intended for use with teletype printing terminals.

Languages use characters to form words and sentences. BInary files use ASCII code to do the same. For example, the sentence “Hello, My name is Aman” would be written as follows:

That doesn’t mean much to us humans, but it’s a computer’s bread and butter.

But after more than half a century of use, the disadvantages of using ASCII character encoding are well understood. Some common disadvantages are:

1. Limited character set: Even with extended ASCII, only 255 distinct characters can be represented.
2. Inefficient character encoding: Standard ASCII encoding is efficient for English language and numerical data. Representing characters from other alphabets requires more overhead such as escape codes.

Unicode: A Way to Store Every Symbol, Ever

Unicode is an encoding system that solves the space issue of ASCII. Like ASCII, Unicode assigns a unique code, called a code point, to each character. However, Unicode’s more sophisticated system can produce over a million code points, more than enough to account for every character in any language.

The Unicode Standard provides codes for over 100,000 characters from the world’s alphabets, ideograph sets, and symbol collections, including classical and historical texts of many written languages. The characters can be represented in different encoding forms.

And now, Unicode is the universal standard for encoding all human languages, and yeah, it even includes emojis. It has been adopted by all modern software providers and now allows data to be transported through many different platforms, devices, and applications without corruption.

But, Unicode alone doesn’t store words in binary. Computers need a way to translate Unicode into binary so that its characters can be stored in text files. Here’s where UTF-8 comes in.

UTF-8: The Final Piece of the Puzzle

UTF-8 is an encoding system for Unicode. It can translate any Unicode character to a matching unique binary string, and can also translate the binary string back to a Unicode character. This is the meaning of UTF(Unicode Transformation Format).

There are other encoding systems for Unicode besides UTF-8, but UTF-8 is unique because it represents characters in one-byte units. Remember that one byte consists of eight bits, hence the “8” in its name.

Advantages of UTF-8 Encoding:

1. Spatial efficiency is a key advantage of UTF-8 encoding
2. UTF-8 encoding is its backward compatibility with ASCII. The first 128 characters in the Unicode library match those in the ASCII library.
3. Efficient for network transmission since it effectively compresses out the zero bits at the front of the number.

UTF-8 VS UTF-16:

Both these handle the same Unicode characters. The difference is that UTF-8 encodes characters as 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit while UTF-16 encodes characters as 16-bit or 32-bit.

UTF-8 always results in smaller data and tends to be more popular.

Conclusion:

For our day-to-day life, UTF-8 is mostly invisible, somewhat like the precise voltage used in your home. It’s used by almost every computer system and programming language and application in the world, making text interoperable and able to represent any written language.

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