What is the difference between Unicode and UTF-8?

Unicode is a character set that assigns unique numbers (code points) to characters from all writing systems, while UTF-8 is an encoding method for representing Unicode characters as bytes. Unicode defines what characters exist and their code point numbers. UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are different ways to encode those Unicode characters into binary data. For example, the Unicode character "A" has code point U+0041, and UTF-8 encodes it as a single byte 0x41. UTF-8 uses variable-length encoding: 1 byte for ASCII, 2-4 bytes for other characters. This makes UTF-8 efficient and backward compatible with ASCII. When working with JSON, understanding this distinction helps: JSON stores text as Unicode characters, and UTF-8 encoding converts that text to bytes for storage and transmission. Our JSON tools at jsonconsole.com handle UTF-8 encoded Unicode automatically, properly displaying all international characters.