ASCII vs Unicode + UTF-8

unicode utf-8 character-encoding ascii
Quest Monger picture Quest Monger · Jan 23, 2014 · Viewed 77k times · Source

Was reading Joel Spolsky's 'The Absolute Minimum' about character encoding. It is my understanding that ASCII is a Code-point + Encoding scheme, and in modern times, we use Unicode as the Code-point scheme and UTF-8 as the Encoding scheme. Is this correct?

Answer

Remy Lebeau picture Remy Lebeau · Jan 23, 2014

In modern times, ASCII is now a subset of UTF-8, not its own scheme. UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII.

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