UTF-8 stands for “Unicode Transformation Format - 8 bits.” Encoding allows computers to map characters to specific bytes in memory, and then to display the bytes as characters, e.g. on a web page. UTF-8 is the encoding form of the Unicode standard, the most widely used character encoding standard in the world.

A code point is a number assigned to represent an abstract character in a system for representing text (such as Unicode). In Unicode, a code point is expressed in the form "U+1234" where "1234" is the assigned number. For example, the character "A" is assigned a code point of U+0041.

A character set is a set of letters, numbers, special characters, and other elements used to represent information. The term code page refers to a coded character set. A character set is independent of a coded representation.

File encodings, also known as character encodings, specify how to represent characters when text processing. One encoding may be preferable over another in terms of which language characters it can or cannot handle, although Unicode is usually preferred.