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a bit more about the encoding scheme
The '''UTF-8''' standard is a way of encoding [[Unicode]] characters, invented in a single evening by two computer programmers in New Jersey. [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt UTF-8 history
The '''UTF-8''' standard is a way of encoding [[Unicode]] characters, invented in a single evening by two computer programmers in New Jersey. [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt UTF-8 history]
]
Each character is formatted into 8-bit bytes, with simple [[ASCII]] characters requiring only one byte, and more complex character sets taking up to 6 bytes. The idea is to pack as many bits as possible into each byte, while also indicating how many (more) bytes are needed to complete the encoding.
Each byte sequence starts with a byte whose initial bits indicates how many total bytes it takes to encode the character. If the initial bit is 0, then it's a 7-bit ASCII character which fits in one byte. Nearly all text written in American English will fit in this encoding.