UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation-8-bit) is an character encoding defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) which enables us to encode every possible character code points to unicode.
It defines two mapping methods - the Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) encodings, and the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) encodings. Using mathematical algorithms, UTF-8 uses 8 data bits to encode the data.
Why use UTF-8?
Previously ASCII was the most used encoding. However ASCII has character limits of 128 and extended ASCII of 256 characters. So ASCII can only be used for english. It cannot be used to represent characters of other languages
This is where UTF comes into picture. When using UTF each character is assigend a unique number called code point. It supports multiple languages.