What is difference between UTF-8 and HTML entities?

html-entities, php, utf-8

Solution

See UTF-8 more as a means to losslessly and self-synchronising map a list of natural numbers to a bytestream so that you can get the natural numbers back (lossless) and if you just fall 'in the middle' of the stream that's not a big problem. (self-synchronizing)

Each natural number just happens to represent a 'character'.

HTML entities is a way to represent those same natural numbers in a way like: ``, stands for the natural number 127, in unicode that being the `DEL` character.

In UTF-8 that's the bytestream: `0111 1111`

Once you go above 127 it becomes more than one octet, therefore, 128 becomes: `1000 0001 1111 1111`.

Two `DEL` chars in a row become `0111 1111 0111 1111`. UTF-8 is designed in such a way, that it's always possible to retrieve the original list of 'unicode scalar values' from the bytestream, even though a bytestream of for instance 4 octets can map back to between 1 and 4 different of such scalar values. UTF-8 is thus 'variable length' as they call it.

Problem

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