<P> It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII . Code points with lower numerical values , which tend to occur more frequently , are encoded using fewer bytes . The first 128 characters of Unicode , which correspond one - to - one with ASCII , are encoded using a single octet with the same binary value as ASCII , so that valid ASCII text is valid UTF - 8 - encoded Unicode as well . Since ASCII bytes do not occur when encoding non-ASCII code points into UTF - 8 , UTF - 8 is safe to use within most programming and document languages that interpret certain ASCII characters in a special way , such as `` / '' in filenames , `` \ '' in escape sequences , and `` % '' in printf . </P>
<P> It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII . Code points with lower numerical values , which tend to occur more frequently , are encoded using fewer bytes . The first 128 characters of Unicode , which correspond one - to - one with ASCII , are encoded using a single octet with the same binary value as ASCII , so that valid ASCII text is valid UTF - 8 - encoded Unicode as well . Since ASCII bytes do not occur when encoding non-ASCII code points into UTF - 8 , UTF - 8 is safe to use within most programming and document languages that interpret certain ASCII characters in a special way , such as `` / '' in filenames , `` \ '' in escape sequences , and `` % '' in printf . </P>
where are the ascii characters found in the utf-8 code points
where are the ascii characters found in the utf-8 code points
The first 128 characters
The first 128 characters