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# UTF-8

UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-width character encoding standard that is widely used for representing the characters of the [Unicode ](/cryptography/general-knowledge/encoding/character-encoding/unicode.md)character set. It was designed as a replacement for [ASCII ](/cryptography/general-knowledge/encoding/character-encoding/ascii.md)and other single-byte character encodings, with the goal of supporting all characters used in the world's writing systems.

## How it works ?

In UTF-8, each character is represented by one to four bytes, depending on the complexity of the character.

[ASCII ](/cryptography/general-knowledge/encoding/character-encoding/ascii.md)characters are still represented by a single byte, but other characters require more bytes to represent all of their unique details.

The advantage of UTF-8 is that **it is backwards compatible with ASCII** and can be used with existing ASCII-based systems, while also supporting a much wider range of characters.

## Resources

{% embed url="<https://www.charset.org/utf-8>" %}