https://lab.artur-rios.tech/tags/utf-8/Recent content in UTF-8 on Artur Rios LabHugoen-usTue, 20 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000https://lab.artur-rios.tech/fundamentals/text-encoding/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000https://lab.artur-rios.tech/fundamentals/text-encoding/<p>A computer stores nothing but numbers. Every letter you read on a screen, every name in a database and every line of source code is held as a sequence of numbers, and something has to agree on which number means which character. That agreement is a <strong>text encoding</strong>. When it works, nobody notices. When two programs disagree, &ldquo;café&rdquo; turns into &ldquo;café&rdquo;, a customer&rsquo;s name is rejected as invalid, or an emoji crashes a database insert. This article explains what a text encoding is, how the world got from telegraph codes to Unicode, how the modern encodings work bit by bit, and where text still goes wrong. The examples were run with Python 3.10 and Node.js 12, and their output is shown as printed.</p>