What is utf-8

As more languages were used on computers, the world needed to represent more text characters than ASCII allowed (1 byte only allowed 256 characters).

utf-8 was introduced with a variable byte length of 1-4 bytes greatly increasing the range of possible characters.

An advantage of variable sized characters is text did not have unnecessary bytes for very common ASCII (only requiring 1 byte still in utf-8).

A downside of variable sized characters is that character lookup can no longer be done quickly (O(1) constant time) with a simple indexing (e.g. my_text[3] to get the 4th character). It's possible that the preceding characters could have variable widths, altering where the 4th character actually begins in the sequence of bytes.

Instead we must iterate through a utf-8 byte sequence to understand where the Unicode characters actually begin (O(n) linear time).

Ferris: "I'm mostly just happy to have utf-8 for representing emojis of my underwater friends."

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