3 ms·

this doesn't "just work" at all? utf-8 is a variable width encoding and if you treat it like ascii your software just isn't going to work outside of the ascii

• PhilipRoman 3y ago
  But it does - the genius of utf-8 is that it was deliberately designed to be backwards compatible (it even preserves the ascii sorting order). You can run C programs written before utf-8 was invented with utf-8 inputs (unlike with the abomination that is utf-16). If a code point is outside the ascii range (0-127 inclusive), then it's utf-8 encoding is also guaranteed to not contain any ascii bytes. So as long as you treat anything inside 128-255 as "some unknown character", the utf-8 code points will be preserved and eventually displayed when the byte sequence is parsed as utf-8 by your terminal/browser/whatever.