Guidance

Encoding characters

Updated 9 August 2022

Use , an encoding form for character sets, for government digital services and technology.

1. Summary of the standard바카라 사이트™s use for government

Unicode is based on the character set, but expands ASCII to include characters for most written languages.

UTF-8:

  • is one of the encoding forms for Unicode
  • encodes all Unicode characters without changing the ASCII code

This makes UTF-8 flexible for a wide range of uses. For example, the default character encoding in HTML-5 is UTF-8.

The government chooses standards using the open standards approval process and the Open Standards Board has final approval. Read more about the approval .

2. How this standard meet user needs

Users of this standard include:

  • publishers of government data
  • data scientists
  • data analysts
  • developers

UTF-8 is an international standard. By using it you can read, write, store and exchange text that remains stable over time and across different systems.

You will also:

  • prevent accidental or unanticipated corruption of text as it transfers between systems
  • save operational costs by making it easier to find and fix errors in the text
  • have accurately translated languages moving between systems
  • keep file sizes smaller

3. How to use the standard

To use UTF-8 you need to:

  • save text in
  • declare the character encoding, for example, W3 has an example of
  • check your server has the correct HTTP declarations so that they do not override your encoding

Read the W3.org article on for more information.