Encoding Reference

Character Encoding Guides

Understand how characters become bytes. Start with Unicode code points, then compare UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, and ASCII encodings.

Unicode Character EncodingHow Unicode assigns stable code points to characters and why that model separates identity from bytes.3 sections UTF-8 Encoding GuideThe variable-width byte encoding used by most of the web, with one to four bytes per code point.3 sections UTF-16 Encoding GuideThe 16-bit-unit encoding used by Windows APIs, Java, and JavaScript string internals.3 sections UTF-32 Encoding GuideA fixed four-byte encoding where every code point takes the same amount of space.3 sections ASCII Character EncodingThe 128-character American Standard Code for Information Interchange and its role inside Unicode.3 sections