UTF-8

One of the main characteristics of UTF-8 is that preserves the full range of the US-ASCII characters. Thus, when UTF-8 was introduced, it was already compatible with software and data that processed ASCII characters exclusively. (See also Adoption of ISO 10646).

UTF-8 encodes uses a varying number of bytes to encode the individual Universal Character Set (UCS).

The byte-values C0, C1, F5 and FF occur never in UTF-8 encoded text.

The boundaries between characters are easily found from any byte in a UTF-8 stream.

Boyer-Moore fast search algorithm can be applied.

The BOM for UTF-8 is ef bb bf, however, the Unicode standard does not recommend it.

Even though the BOM is not recommend for UTF-8, PowerShell scripts check for such a BOM and especialy in conjunction with COM, it is often very benefical to use the BOM.

UTF-8 was developed by Ken Thompson

RFC 3629: UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646

Python PEP 686 makes UTF-8 the default encoding for files, stdio and pipes.

iconv

Perl and utf8

SAS utf-8 sessions

The Windows code page number for UTF-8 is 65001 (see for example the cmd.exe command chcp).