UTF-8 is a 8-bit text encoding capable of encoding a much wider range of characters than ASCII. UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format.

In UTF-8, characters 0 through 127 have the same meaning as their ASCII counterparts. Unlike ASCII, UTF-8 is not limited to 7-bits per character; it can use all 8 bits and in fact many glyphs require 2, 3, or even 4 bytes (octets).