What does UTF-8 stand for?

UTF-8 stands for "Unicode Transformation Format - 8-bit," a character encoding capable of representing all Unicode characters. The "8-bit" refers to using 8-bit code units, where characters are encoded using one to four bytes. UTF-8 was created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike in 1992 to provide a universal character encoding that is backward compatible with ASCII. The encoding uses one byte for ASCII characters, making it efficient for English text, while supporting the full Unicode character set of over 140,000 characters from all languages. UTF-8 has become the dominant encoding for the internet, JSON, and web APIs because of its efficiency and compatibility. When working with JSON on our platform at jsonconsole.com, UTF-8 ensures your data correctly represents characters from any language, including special symbols and emojis, without encoding issues.