What is the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode?

Unicode is the catalog of characters and their code points (numbers). UTF-8 is one of several ways to encode those code points as bytes on disk or over a network. U+00E9 (the letter é) is the same Unicode code point everywhere; in UTF-8 it encodes as two bytes (0xC3 0xA9); in UTF-16 it encodes as two bytes in a different pattern.

Why do emoji need 4 UTF-8 bytes?

Emoji sit in high Unicode planes above U+FFFF. Any code point from U+10000 to U+10FFFF encodes as 4 UTF-8 bytes. Code points up to U+007F need 1 byte (ASCII range), up to U+07FF need 2, up to U+FFFF need 3, and above that, 4.

What is a BOM and why do the tools strip it?

A BOM (Byte Order Mark, 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF in UTF-8) is an optional 3-byte prefix that identifies a stream as UTF-8. Some tools emit it (Windows Notepad, some exporters); many systems treat the BOM as part of the text, which causes a stray character at the start. The decoders strip it automatically so the output is clean.

What happens if the input is corrupted or not valid UTF-8?

The decoders replace invalid byte sequences with the Unicode replacement character (U+FFFD, shown as a black diamond with question mark). They count how many were replaced so you can tell how damaged the input is. A few replacements usually mean one corrupted byte; hundreds usually mean the input was not UTF-8 at all.

Are my inputs sent to a server?

No. All five decoders process everything in the browser. The input string never leaves the page. Safe for production tokens, private messages, or internal logs. The browser network tab shows zero requests during decoding.

UTF-8 Tools

UTF-8 decoders handle the jobs where you have a text-encoded representation of Unicode bytes and you want the actual readable text back: a Base64 string that holds Greek or Chinese, a space-separated hex dump from xxd that contains emoji, a list of decimal code points you copied from a Wikipedia article. 30 browser-based decoders, every one UTF-8 aware, every one correctly handling multi-byte sequences for emoji, CJK characters, accented letters, and combined marks.

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