38 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: UTF 8 Reference
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---
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## UTF 8 Reference
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UTF 8 is an encoding scheme used to translate the characters we see on screens into numbers computers can store. Specifying a character encoding like UTF8 will allow the browser to properly display advanced characters like accented letters and emoji.
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In HTML documents, you can specify the character encoding on the page by placing this meta tag in the `head` tag of your HTML page: `<meta charset="UTF-8">`. UTF 8 is the standard encoding.
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The [Unicode](https://www.unicode.org/) standard was developed in order to accomodate the characters used in languages across the world.
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But wait! What does Unicode have to do with UTF 8? UTF 8 is the encoding scheme but it is important to understand Unicode is the character set definition. In plain speak what this means is Unicode defines a unique number - called a code point - for many major characters used in languages across the world and UTF 8 will translate (aka encode) the character into computer-friendly binary format. <sup>1</sup> Here is an example:
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1. You want to mention freeCodeCamp somewhere in your web page (because, you know, freeCodeCamp is 🔥 🔥 🔥).
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2. The character code points to spell freeCodeCamp as defined in Unicode are:
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| f | r | e | e | C | o | d | e | C | a | m | p |
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| :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: |
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|102| 114| 101| 101| 67| 111| 100| 101| 67| 97| 109| 112|
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3. UTF 8 translates the code points to binary: 1100110 1110010 1100101 1100101 1000011 1101111 1100100 1100101 1000011 1100001 1101101 1110000
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### How to use UTF-8 In Your Webpage
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Specify a meta tag with a charset of UTF 8 in your head tag.
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```html
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<head>
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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</head>
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```
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#### More Information:
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<!-- Please add any articles you think might be helpful to read before writing the article -->
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* [Unicode Character Code Charts](https://www.unicode.org/charts/index.html)
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* [HTML Unicode Reference](https://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_html_utf8.asp)
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