Unicode只定义码位，即代表一个字符的数字。如何在内存中存储这些代码点取决于所使用的编码。UTF-8是编码Unicode字符的一种方式。

如果我可以总结一下我从这篇文章中收集到的信息:

Unicode将字符分配给序数(十进制形式)。(这些数字被称为码位。)

à -> 224

UTF-8是一种将这些序数(十进制形式)“转换”为二进制表示的编码。

224 -> 11000011 10100000

注意，我们讨论的是224的二进制表示，而不是它的二进制形式，即0b11100000。

扩展一下其他人给出的答案:

我们有许多语言和许多字符，计算机应该理想地显示这些字符。Unicode为每个字符分配一个唯一的数字或码位。

计算机处理字节之类的数字。这里略过一点历史并忽略内存寻址问题，8位计算机将8位字节视为硬件上容易表示的最大数字单位，16位计算机将其扩展为两个字节，等等。

Old character encodings such as ASCII are from the (pre-) 8-bit era, and try to cram the dominant language in computing at the time, i.e. English, into numbers ranging from 0 to 127 (7 bits). With 26 letters in the alphabet, both in capital and non-capital form, numbers and punctuation signs, that worked pretty well. ASCII got extended by an 8th bit for other, non-English languages, but the additional 128 numbers/code points made available by this expansion would be mapped to different characters depending on the language being displayed. The ISO-8859 standards are the most common forms of this mapping; ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 (also known as ISO-Latin-1, latin1, and yes there are two different versions of the 8859 ISO standard as well).

但是，当您想要表示来自多种语言的字符时，这是不够的，所以将所有可用字符塞进一个字节是行不通的。

本质上有两种不同类型的编码:一种是通过添加更多位来扩大值范围。这些编码的例子是UCS2(2字节= 16位)和UCS4(4字节= 32位)。它们与ASCII和ISO-8859标准存在本质上相同的问题，因为它们的值范围仍然有限，即使限制要高得多。

The other type of encoding uses a variable number of bytes per character, and the most commonly known encodings for this are the UTF encodings. All UTF encodings work in roughly the same manner: you choose a unit size, which for UTF-8 is 8 bits, for UTF-16 is 16 bits, and for UTF-32 is 32 bits. The standard then defines a few of these bits as flags: if they're set, then the next unit in a sequence of units is to be considered part of the same character. If they're not set, this unit represents one character fully. Thus the most common (English) characters only occupy one byte in UTF-8 (two in UTF-16, 4 in UTF-32), but other language characters can occupy six bytes or more.

多字节编码(在上面的解释之后，我应该说多单元编码)的优点是它们相对节省空间，但缺点是查找子字符串、比较等操作都必须在执行这些操作之前将字符解码为unicode码点(尽管有一些快捷方式)。

UCS标准和UTF标准都对Unicode中定义的代码点进行编码。理论上，这些编码可以用来编码任何数字(在编码支持的范围内)——当然，这些编码是用来编码Unicode码点的。这就是它们之间的关系。

Windows将所谓的“Unicode”字符串处理为UTF-16字符串，而现在大多数unix默认为UTF-8。像HTTP这样的通信协议最适合使用UTF-8，因为UTF-8中的单位大小与ASCII中的单位大小相同，而且大多数此类协议都是在ASCII时代设计的。另一方面，UTF-16在表示所有现存语言时提供了最佳的平均空间/处理性能。

Unicode标准定义的代码点比能用32位表示的要少。因此，出于所有实际目的，UTF-32和UCS4变成了相同的编码，因为您不太可能必须在UTF-32中处理多单元字符。

希望这能补充一些细节。

UTF-8是Unicode文本的一种可能的编码方案。

Unicode是一个范围广泛的标准，它定义了超过140,000个字符，并为每个字符分配一个数字代码(一个码位)。它还定义了如何对文本进行排序、规范化、更改大小写等规则。Unicode中的字符由一个从0到0x10FFFF(包括0x10FFFF)的码位表示，但有些码位是保留的，不能用于字符。

将一串Unicode码位编码成二进制流的方法不止一种。这些被称为“编码”。最直接的编码是UTF-32，它将每个代码点存储为32位整数，每个整数宽为4字节。因为代码点最多只能到0x10FFFF(需要21位)，所以这种编码有点浪费。

UTF-8是另一种编码，由于与UTF-32和其他编码相比有许多优点，它正在成为事实上的标准。UTF-8将每个码位编码为1、2、3或4个字节值的序列。ASCII范围内的码位被编码为一个单字节值，以便与ASCII兼容。超出这个范围的代码点分别使用2、3或4个字节，这取决于它们所在的范围。

UTF-8在设计时考虑了这些属性:

ASCII characters are encoded exactly as they are in ASCII, such that an ASCII string is also a valid UTF-8 string representing the same characters. More efficient: Text strings in UTF-8 almost always occupy less space than the same strings in either UTF-32 or UTF-16, with just a few exceptions. Binary sorting: Sorting UTF-8 strings using a binary sort will still result in all code points being sorted in numerical order. When a code point uses multiple bytes, none of those bytes contain values in the ASCII range, ensuring that no part of them could be mistaken for an ASCII character. This is also a security feature. UTF-8 can be easily validated, and distinguished from other character encodings by a validator. Text in other 8-bit or multi-byte encodings will very rarely also validate as UTF-8 due to the very specific structure of UTF-8. Random access: At any point in a UTF-8 string it is possible to tell if the byte at that position is the first byte of a character or not, and to find the start of the next or current character, without needing to scan forwards or backwards more than 3 bytes or to know how far into the string we started reading from.

它们是一样的，不是吗?

不，他们不是。

我认为你引用的维基百科页面的第一句话给出了一个很好的，简短的总结:

UTF-8是一种可变宽度字符编码，能够使用一到四个8位字节编码Unicode中的所有1,112,064个有效代码点。

阐述:

Unicode is a standard, which defines a map from characters to numbers, the so-called code points, (like in the example below). For the full mapping, you can have a look here. ! -> U+0021 (21), " -> U+0022 (22), \# -> U+0023 (23) UTF-8 is one of the ways to encode these code points in a form a computer can understand, aka bits. In other words, it's a way/algorithm to convert each of those code points to a sequence of bits or convert a sequence of bits to the equivalent code points. Note that there are a lot of alternative encodings for Unicode.

乔尔给出了一个非常好的解释，并概述了这里的历史。

让我用一个例子来说明这个话题:

A Chinese character:      汉
its Unicode value:        U+6C49
convert 6C49 to binary:   01101100 01001001

目前还没有什么神奇的，很简单。现在，假设我们决定将这个字符存储在硬盘驱动器上。为此，我们需要以二进制格式存储字符。我们可以简单地将其存储为'01101100 01001001'。完成了!

但是等一下，'01101100 01001001'是一个字符还是两个字符?你知道这是一个字符，因为我告诉过你，但当计算机读取它时，它不知道。所以我们需要某种编码来告诉计算机把它当做一个。

这就是UTF-8规则的用武之地:https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/utf8.htm

Binary format of bytes in sequence

1st Byte    2nd Byte    3rd Byte    4th Byte    Number of Free Bits   Maximum Expressible Unicode Value
0xxxxxxx                                                7             007F hex (127)
110xxxxx    10xxxxxx                                (5+6)=11          07FF hex (2047)
1110xxxx    10xxxxxx    10xxxxxx                  (4+6+6)=16          FFFF hex (65535)
11110xxx    10xxxxxx    10xxxxxx    10xxxxxx    (3+6+6+6)=21          10FFFF hex (1,114,111)

根据上面的表格，如果我们想要使用UTF-8格式存储这个字符，我们需要给我们的字符加上一些'headers'前缀。我们的中文字符有16位长(你自己计算二进制值)，所以我们将在第三行使用该格式，因为它提供了足够的空间:

Header  Place holder    Fill in our Binary   Result         
1110    xxxx            0110                 11100110
10      xxxxxx          110001               10110001
10      xxxxxx          001001               10001001

将结果写在一行中:

11100110 10110001 10001001

这是UTF-8二进制值的汉字!你自己看看:https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/6c49/index.htm

总结

A Chinese character:      汉
its Unicode value:        U+6C49
convert 6C49 to binary:   01101100 01001001
encode 6C49 as UTF-8:     11100110 10110001 10001001

附注:如果你想用Python学习本主题，请点击这里。