UNICODE AND UTF-8
A Unicode string consists of a sequence of numbers that are between 0 and 0x10ffff, where each number represents a group of bytes. An encoding is the manner in which a Unicode string is translated into a sequence of bytes. Among the various encodings, UTF-8 (“Unicode Transformation Format”) is perhaps the most common, and it's also the default encoding for many systems. The digit 8 in UTF-8 indicates that the encoding uses 8-bit numbers, whereas UTF-16 uses 16-bit numbers (but this encoding is less common).
The ASCII character set is a subset of UTF-8, so a valid ASCII string can be read as a UTF-8 string without any re-encoding required. In addition, a Unicode string can be converted into a UTF-8 string.
