UTF-8

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This page is only an illustration of how you can encode a Unicode character in UTF-8.  Read RFC 2279 for first-hand information.

1. Take the Unicode value of the character to find out how many bytes you need.  Unicode values are given in hexadecimal numbers:

   0000-007F	1 byte
   0080-07FF	2 bytes
   0800-FFFF	3 bytes
   10000-FFFFF	4 bytes

2. Convert the hex code to binary form and fill in the empty bits:

   1 byte	0xxxxxxx
   2 bytes	110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
   3 bytes	1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
   4 bytes	11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

Example

The Unicode value of 'tea' is 8336, so you need 3 bytes.  The binary form of hexadecimal 8336 is

10000011 00110110

Fill the empty slots of the three-byte template with the binary value of and you will get:

11101000 10001100 10110110

Thus you have converted 0x8336 to 0xE8 0x8C 0xB6.  Set your browser to UTF-8 to see these three bytes

茶

as one Chinese character: .  In Western mode, you will see three characters: .

Source of Information

François Yergeau. 1998. UTF-8, a transformation format of  ISO 10646. RFC 2279.

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