How many characters can UTF-8 encode?

utf-8 character-encoding ascii
eMRe picture eMRe · Apr 19, 2012 · Viewed 89.7k times · Source

If UTF-8 is 8 bits, does it not mean that there can be only maximum of 256 different characters?

The first 128 code points are the same as in ASCII. But it says UTF-8 can support up to million of characters?

How does this work?

Answer

zwippie picture zwippie · Apr 19, 2012

UTF-8 does not use one byte all the time, it's 1 to 4 bytes.

The first 128 characters (US-ASCII) need one byte.

The next 1,920 characters need two bytes to encode. This covers the remainder of almost all Latin alphabets, and also Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Tāna alphabets, as well as Combining Diacritical Marks.

Three bytes are needed for characters in the rest of the Basic Multilingual Plane, which contains virtually all characters in common use[12] including most Chinese, Japanese and Korean [CJK] characters.

Four bytes are needed for characters in the other planes of Unicode, which include less common CJK characters, various historic scripts, mathematical symbols, and emoji (pictographic symbols).

source: Wikipedia

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