What is UTF-8 Encoding? A Guide for Non-Programmers

Text: its importance on the internet goes without saying. It’s the first “T” in “HTTP”, the only “T” in “HTML”, and virtually every website uses it somehow, be it a URL, a piece of marketing copy, a product review, a viral Tweet, or a blog post. (Hi there!)

Before we begin, you should be familiar with the basics of HTML and ready to dive into some light computer science.

What Is UTF-8?

UTF-8 stands for “Unicode Transformation Format - 8 bits.” That’s not helpful to us yet, so let’s rewind to the basics.

Binary: How Computers Store Information

In order to store information, computers use a binary system. In binary, all data is represented in sequences of 1s and 0s. The most basic unit of binary is a bit, which is just a single 1 or 0. The next largest unit of binary, a byte, consists of 8 bits. An example of a byte is “01101011”.

Every digital asset you’ve ever encountered — from software to mobile apps to websites to Instagram stories — is built on this system of bytes, which are strung together in a way that makes sense to computers. When we refer to file sizes, we’re referencing the number of bytes. For example, a kilobyte is roughly one thousand bytes, and a gigabyte is roughly one billion bytes.

Text is one of many assets that computers store and process. Text is made up of individual characters, each of which is represented in computers by a string of bits. These strings are assembled to form digital words, sentences, paragraphs, romance novels, and so on.

ASCII: Converting Symbols to Binary

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was an early standardized encoding system for text. Encoding is the process of converting characters in human languages into binary sequences that computers can process.

ASCII’s library includes every upper-case and lower-case letter in the Latin alphabet (A, B, C…), every digit from 0 to 9, and some common symbols (like /, !, and ?). It assigns each of these characters a unique three-digit code and a unique byte.

The table below shows examples of ASCII characters with their associated codes and bytes.

Just as characters come together to form words and sentences in language, binary code does so in text files. So, the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” represented in ASCII binary would be:

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

The number of characters that ASCII can represent is limited to the number of unique bytes available, since each character gets one byte. If you do the math, you’ll find that there are 256 different ways of groups eight 1s and 0s together. This gives us 256 different bytes, or 256 ways to represent a character in ASCII. When ASCII was introduced in 1960, this was okay, since developers needed only 128 bytes to represent all the English characters and symbols they needed.

But, as computing expanded globally, computer systems began to store text in languages besides English, many of which used non-ASCII characters. New systems were created to map other languages to the same set of 256 unique bytes, but having multiple encoding systems was inefficient and confusing. Developers needed a better way to encode all possible characters with one system.

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Unicode: A Way to Store Every Symbol, Ever

Enter Unicode, 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.

Unicode is now the universal standard for encoding all human languages. And yes, it even includes emojis.

Below are some examples of text characters and their matching code points. Each code point begins with “U” for “Unicode,” followed by a unique string of characters to represent the character.

If you want to learn how code points are generated and what they mean in Unicode, check out this in-depth explanation.

So, we now have a standardized way of representing every character used by every human language in a single library. This solves the issue of multiple labeling systems for different languages — any computer on Earth can use Unicode.

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”, or “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.

More specifically, UTF-8 converts a code point (which represents a single character in Unicode) into a set of one to four bytes. The first 128 characters in the Unicode library — the characters we saw in ASCII — are represented as one byte. Characters that appear later in the Unicode library are encoded as two-byte, three-byte, and eventually four-byte binary units.

Below is the same character table from above, with the UTF-8 output for each character added. Notice how some characters are represented as just one byte, while others use more.

Why would UTF-8 convert some characters to one byte, and others up to four bytes? In short, to save memory. By using less space to represent more common characters (i.e. ASCII characters), UTF-8 reduces file size while allowing for a much larger number of less-common characters. These less-common characters are encoded into two or more bytes, but this is okay if they’re stored sparingly.

Spatial efficiency is a key advantage of UTF-8 encoding. If instead every Unicode character was represented by four bytes, a text file written in English would be four times the size of the same file encoded with UTF-8.

Another benefit of UTF-8 encoding is its backward compatibility with ASCII. The first 128 characters in the Unicode library match those in the ASCII library, and UTF-8 translates these 128 Unicode characters into the same binary strings as ASCII. As a result, UTF-8 can take a text file formatted by ASCII and convert it to human-readable text without issue.

UTF-8 Characters in Web Development

UTF-8 is the most common character encoding method used on the internet today, and is the default character set for HTML5. Over 95% of all websites, likely including your own, store characters this way. Additionally, common data transfer methods over the web, like XML and JSON, are encoded with UTF-8 standards.

Since it’s now the standard method for encoding text on the web, all your site pages and databases should use UTF-8. A content management system or website builder will save your files in UTF-8 format by default, but it’s still a good idea to make sure you’re sticking to this best practice.

Text files encoded with UTF-8 must indicate this to the software processing it. Otherwise, the software won’t properly translate the binary back into characters. In HTML files, you might see a string of code like the following near the top:

This tells the browser that the HTML file is encoded by UTF-8, so that the browser can translate it back to legible text.

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UTF-8 vs. UTF-16

As I mentioned, UTF-8 is not the only encoding method for Unicode characters — there’s also UTF-16. These methods differ in the number of bytes they need to store a character. UTF-8 encodes a character into a binary string of one, two, three, or four bytes. UTF-16 encodes a Unicode character into a string of either two or four bytes.

This distinction is evident from their names. In UTF-8, the smallest binary representation of a character is one byte, or eight bits. In UTF-16, the smallest binary representation of a character is two bytes, or sixteen bits.

Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 can translate Unicode characters into computer-friendly binary and back again. However, they are not compatible with each other. These systems use different algorithms to map code points to binary strings, so the binary output for any given character will look different from both methods:

UTF-8 encoding is preferable to UTF-16 on the majority of websites, because it uses less memory. Recall that UTF-8 encodes each ASCII character in just one byte. UTF-16 must encode these same characters in either two or four bytes. This means that an English text file encoded with UTF-16 would be at least double the size of the same file encoded with UTF-8.

UTF-16 is only more efficient than UTF-8 on some non-English websites. If a website uses a language with characters farther back in the Unicode library, UTF-8 will encode all characters as four bytes, whereas UTF-16 might encode many of the same characters as only two bytes. Still, if your pages are filled with ABCs and 123s, stick with UTF-8.

Decoding the World of UTF-8 Encoding

That was a lot of words about words, so let’s summarize what we’ve covered:

1. Computers store data, including text characters, as binary (1s and 0s).
2. ASCII was an early way of encoding, or mapping characters to binary code so that computers could store them. However, ASCII did not provide enough room for non-Latin characters and numbers to be represented in binary.
3. Unicode was the solution to this problem. Unicode assigns a unique “code point” to every character in every human language.
4. UTF-8 is a Unicode character encoding method. This means that UTF-8 takes the code point for a given Unicode character and translates it into a string of binary. It also does the reverse, reading in binary digits and converting them back to characters.
5. UTF-8 is currently the most popular encoding method on the internet because it can efficiently store text containing any character.
6. UTF-16 is another encoding method, but is less efficient for storing text files (except for those written in certain non-English languages).

Unicode translation isn’t something most of us need to think about when browsing or designing websites, and that’s exactly the point — to create a seamless text processing system that functions for all languages and web browsers. If it’s working well, you won’t notice it.

But, if you find your website’s pages are using up an inordinate amount of space, or if your text is littered with ▢s and �s, it’s time to put your new knowledge of UTF-8 to work.