UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding system that has become the dominant standard for text on the web. It achieves backward compatibility with ASCII by using the unused eighth bit to indicate multi-byte sequences, while maintaining self-synchronization through clever bit patterns that distinguish leading bytes from continuation bytes. The encoding can represent over 2 million code points using 1-4 bytes, with the number of leading ones in the first byte indicating the total length. This design allows UTF-8 to efficiently encode ASCII text in single bytes while supporting all Unicode characters, making it both space-efficient and universally compatible.
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