UTF-8
The most widely used encoding for Unicode text. It stores each character in one to four bytes, with plain English letters and digits taking one byte each.
Saving and reading files as UTF-8 avoids most broken-character problems. The damage usually happens when a UTF-8 file is opened as an older encoding, or the other way around.
Where it comes up
- Broken accented charactersAccented letters appear as pairs of odd symbols or as question marks, because the file was read with the wrong encoding.
See also
- UnicodeThe standard that assigns a number to the characters of nearly all the world's writing systems, along with symbols and emoji, so that text in any of them can be represented in one scheme.
- EncodingThe rule that maps the bytes in a file to characters. Reading a file with the wrong encoding turns accented letters and symbols into nonsense.
- Byte order markAn invisible character that some programs write at the very start of a text file to signal its encoding. It is often shortened to BOM.