What does UTF-8 enable in terms of character storage?

UTF-8 is a character encoding standard that allows for the representation of a wide array of characters from different languages and symbol sets. It utilizes variable-length encoding, meaning that it can represent characters using one to four bytes. This flexibility is a significant feature of UTF-8, allowing it to efficiently encode both standard ASCII characters, which can be stored in a single byte, and more complex characters, such as those in languages like Chinese or emojis, which require multiple bytes.

This capability to store characters in multiple bytes enables UTF-8 to support a vast range of characters while maintaining compatibility with systems that only recognize single-byte ASCII characters. As a result, it has become the most widely used character encoding on the web due to its efficiency and versatility in representing diverse text.