Free UTF-8 Encoder/Decoder

UTF-8 is variable-length encoding optimized for ASCII. ASCII uses 1 byte, European letters 2 bytes, Asian characters 3 bytes, and emoji 4 bytes. This makes UTF-8 efficient for mostly-ASCII text.

Mojibake is garbled text caused by encoding mismatches. UTF-8 text read as Latin-1, or vice versa, produces garbage characters. This tool helps identify the actual bytes to diagnose such issues.

Generally no. UTF-8 BOM (EF BB BF) is unnecessary and can cause problems with shell scripts, PHP, and some parsers. Only use BOM if specifically required by your application.

Look for the characteristic byte patterns: valid UTF-8 has specific leading/continuation byte structures. Invalid sequences suggest wrong encoding. This tool shows actual bytes for analysis.

UTF-8 supports all Unicode characters, is backwards-compatible with ASCII, is efficient for Latin text, and is self-synchronizing. These properties made it ideal for the diverse, global web.

Unicode is the character set (assigns numbers to characters). UTF-8 is one encoding of Unicode (how those numbers become bytes). Other encodings include UTF-16 and UTF-32.