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UTF-8 Explained Simply - The Best Video on UTF-8

October 6, 2025

micro   utf   unicode

Screenshot of the Youtube Video

Video: UTF-8, Explained Simply

Channel: @nicbarkeragain (Nic Barker)

This is the best explanation I have found on UTF-8 thus far. I previously said UTF-8 is Brilliant was the cleanest explanation I’ve seen on this subject, well that was shortly beaten on October 2 2025. There are a few reasons why I love this video:

  1. Builds up the need for unicode via history and how the 8th bit on ASCII could be used as parity bit
  2. Interoperability
    • How Unicode-8 is backward compatible - old ASCII format works with new decoder
    • a brief history of how UTF-16 came to existence
    • How Unicode-8 is also forward-compatible - UTF-8 remains compatible with existing ASCII decoder Screenshot of UTF-8 Interoperability.png
  3. Self-synchronization problem in Variable-width encoding bytecode - In the event of a data corruption, how do we know whether we are on the beginning or somewhere in the middle of a byte
    • a question of how to identify the leading byte if dropped in a random chunk of data
  4. How to determine the first byte of a 2, 3, 4-byte code unit sequence Screenshot of UTF-8 Var Width
  5. How to avoid potential conflicts of codepoints existing in different byte sequence (only the shortest representation of a codepoint is used)
  6. Zero-width joiner to combine emojis
  7. How UTF-8 represents Korean - How UTF-8 allows you to construct and edit each block efficiently through Math Screenshot of how Korean works in UTF-8

I definitely should edit my blog on character encoding as there are probably some areas that are quite questionable after going through various articles and videos on unicode over the year.