Validate UTF-8 byte sequences and detect encoding issues
UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8-bit) is a variable-width character encoding capable of encoding all possible Unicode code points. It uses one to four bytes per character and is backward compatible with ASCII. UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for more than 98% of all web pages.
Our UTF-8 Validator helps you verify that text or byte sequences conform to the UTF-8 encoding standard. It can detect malformed sequences, overlong encodings, and other common UTF-8 issues that can cause display problems or security vulnerabilities.
Invalid UTF-8 sequences can cause display issues, security vulnerabilities (like injection attacks), and data corruption. Validation ensures text will display correctly across all systems.
Strict validation rejects overlong encodings (security risk), invalid code points, and surrogate pairs in UTF-8. Non-strict mode only checks for malformed byte sequences.
Common issues include: mixed encodings (UTF-8 with ISO-8859-1), BOM (Byte Order Mark) issues, overlong encodings, invalid continuation bytes, and missing continuation bytes.