UTF-8 character set

Unicode - UTF-x Character sets

Name	Bytes per Character	Description	Range	IANA/MIME Code
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7-bit ASCII	1	The mother of all character sets. Contains 32 invisible control characters, the latin letters A-Z, a-z, the arabic digits 0-9 and a bunch of punctual characters. Code Range 0..127.	0..127	US-ASCII
Unicode based character sets
Unicode, ISO 10646	N.A.	A universal code for all characters someone can think of. Defines characters, assigns them a scalar value, but does not define how characters are rendered graphically or stored in memory.	U+0000..U+100000	N.A.
UTF-8	1..6	A Unicode transformation format that uses 1-Byte characters for all 7-bit US-ASCII characters and sequences of up to 4 bytes for all other Unicode characters.	All Unicode characters	UTF-8
UCS-2	2	A unicode transformation format that uses 2 Bytes (16 Bits) for every character. This character set is not able to render all Unicode scalars and is therefore obsolete.	U+0000..U+FFFF	ISO-10646-UCS-2
UTF-16	2	A unicode transformation format that uses 2 Bytes (16 Bits) for every character. Using the concept of "Surrogate Pairs", this format is able to store all Unicode characters. However, 1 Unicode character can be stored as two contiguous 16-bit words.	All Unicode characters	UTF-16
UCS-4, UTF-32	4	Two unicode transformation formats that use 4 Bytes (32 Bits) for every character. UCS-4 and UTF-32 are the only character sets, which are able to render all Unicode characters in equally long words. UCS-4 and UTF-32 are technically identical.	All Unicode characters	ISO-10646-UCS-4 UTF-32
Single byte character sets
ISO 8859-x	1	An extension of US-ASCII using the eighth bit.	0..127, 160..255	ISO-8859-x
Windows 125x	1	Similar to ISO 8859-x, some characters changed, plus additional characters in the 128..159 range.	0..255	windows-125x

☡ see uft-8 chart