What character encoding should I use for a web page containing mostly Arabic text? Is utf-8 okay?

Question

What character encoding should I use for a web page containing mostly Arabic text?

Is utf-8 okay?

Answer 1

UTF-8 often takes more space than an encoding made for one or a few languages. Latin letters with diacritics and characters from other alphabetic scripts typically take one byte per character in the appropriate multi-byte encoding but take two in UTF-8. East Asian scripts generally have two bytes per character in their multi-byte encodings yet take three bytes per character in UTF-8.