UTF-8
also: UTF8, Unicode Transformation Format
UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding that represents Unicode characters using one to four bytes, allowing it to encode all world languages while remaining backward-compatible with ASCII.
UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit) is the most widely used text encoding on modern Linux systems and the web. It uses 1–4 bytes per character: ASCII characters (0–127) use just 1 byte, making UTF-8 fully backward-compatible with legacy ASCII text, while characters from other languages use 2–4 bytes.
For example, the letter 'A' is encoded as 0x41 (1 byte), the euro symbol '€' as 0xE2 0x82 0xAC (3 bytes), and the emoji '😀' as 0xF0 0x9F 0x98 0x80 (4 bytes).
Linux defaults to UTF-8 for terminal I/O, file handling, and system messages. You can verify your system's locale with locale or set it via environment variables like LANG=en_US.UTF-8. Text files are typically stored in UTF-8, and most modern tools assume UTF-8 unless told otherwise.