Encoding Basics

ASCII

• Character to number mapping
• 0-32 are non-written symbols like breaks, sounds, etc.
• 33 is the first written character and is the exclamation point (!)
• There are 128 total ASCII characters

UTF-8

• UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to four one-byte code units
• As of November 2020, UTF-8 accounts on average for 95.8% of all web pages
• The first 128 characters correspond 1 to 1 with ASCII characters, a big reason for its popularity