UTF-8
UTF-8 is the 8-bit Unicode encoding form. It was designed to allow Unicode to be used in places that support only 8-bit character encodings. A Unicode code point is represented using a sequence of anywhere from one to four 8-bit code units.
One vitally important property of UTF-8 is that it's 100 percent backward compatible with ASCII. That is, valid 7-bit ASCII text is also valid UTF-8 text. As a consequence UTF-8 can be used in any environment that supports 8-bit ASCII-derived encodings, and that environment will be able to correctly interpret and display the 7-bit ASCII characters. (The characters represented by byte values where the most significant bit is set, of course, aren't backward compatible—they have a different representation ...
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