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UTF-8 is a brilliant design
Exploring the brilliant design of UTF-8 encoding system that represents millions of characters while being backward compatible with ASCII
2025-09-12The first time I learned about UTF-8 encoding, I was fascinated by how well-thought and brilliantly it was designed to represent millions of characters from different languages and scripts, and still be backward compatible with ASCII. This code point represents the waving hand emoji "👋" in the Unicode character set(open in playground). ( open in playground)Now this is a valid UTF-8 file, but it doesn't have to be "backward compatible" with ASCII because it contains a non-ASCII character (the emoji).
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