UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding standard used for electronic communication. It is a character encoding system that lets you represent characters as ASCII text while still allowing for international characters, such as Chinese characters. UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units. Code points with lower numerical values, which tend to occur more frequently, are encoded using fewer bytes. UTF-8 was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII, and it results in fewer internationalization issues than any alternative text encoding. UTF-8 is the most widely used ASCII-compatible encoding form for Unicode, and it has become the preferred form for Unicode text files. Some key features of UTF-8 include:

• UTF-8 is capable of encoding all valid Unicode code points using one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units.
• Code points with lower numerical values, which tend to occur more frequently, are encoded using fewer bytes.
• UTF-8 is designed for backward compatibility with ASCII.
• UTF-8 results in fewer internationalization issues than any alternative text encoding.

UTF-8 is widely used in web development and is implemented in all modern operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, and standards such as JSON.