What is the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode?

Question

I have heard conflicting opinions from people - according to the Wikipedia UTF-8 page.

They are the same thing, aren\'t they? Can someone clarify?

Answer 1

They're not the same thing - UTF-8 is a particular way of encoding Unicode.

There are lots of different encodings you can choose from depending on your application and the data you intend to use. The most common are UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 s far as I know.