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UTF-8 Byte Inspector

Inspect the UTF-8 byte representation and Unicode code points of each character in your text. Useful for debugging encoding issues.

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The UTF-8 Byte Inspector shows the Unicode code point and UTF-8 byte representation of every character in your input text. Each character is displayed alongside its U+ code point and the hexadecimal bytes that represent it in UTF-8 encoding.

This tool is invaluable for debugging character encoding issues, understanding how different characters are stored in UTF-8, and working with internationalization (i18n) challenges. See exactly how many bytes each character uses — ASCII characters use 1 byte, accented letters use 2 bytes, CJK characters use 3 bytes, and emojis use 4 bytes.

Processing happens entirely in your browser using the TextEncoder API. No data is sent to any server, making it safe for inspecting text from any source.

How to Use UTF-8 Byte Inspector

  1. 1Type or paste text into the input area.
  2. 2Each character is displayed with its Unicode code point (U+XXXX).
  3. 3The UTF-8 byte representation is shown as hexadecimal values.
  4. 4Use this information to debug encoding issues or understand character sizes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is UTF-8 encoding?▾
UTF-8 is the most widely used character encoding on the web. It represents each Unicode character using 1 to 4 bytes. ASCII characters (English letters, digits) use 1 byte, while characters from other scripts and emojis use 2-4 bytes.
What is a Unicode code point?▾
A Unicode code point is a unique number assigned to every character in the Unicode standard. It is written as U+ followed by a hexadecimal number. For example, 'A' is U+0041 and emojis have code points in the U+1Fxxx range.
Why do some characters use more bytes than others?▾
UTF-8 uses a variable-length encoding. Common ASCII characters need only 1 byte (0-127), Latin/Greek/Cyrillic characters need 2 bytes, CJK ideographs need 3 bytes, and emojis and rare characters need 4 bytes. This keeps English text compact while supporting every Unicode character.
How can the UTF-8 Byte Inspector help debug encoding problems?▾
Encoding issues often occur when text is read with the wrong encoding, producing garbled characters (mojibake). By inspecting the actual byte values, you can determine whether text was correctly encoded as UTF-8 or was misinterpreted from another encoding like Latin-1 or Windows-1252, helping you pinpoint where the corruption happened.