PHP Special Characters

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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that assigns unique numeric values to the 128 most commonly used characters in the English language, including letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. The ASCII character set only includes 128 characters, which is not sufficient for many other languages.

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that can represent virtually any character from any language in the world, including emojis and special characters. Unicode assigns a unique number (code point) to each character, and there are currently over 143,000 characters defined in the Unicode standard.

UTF-8 is a character encoding that can represent any Unicode character using a variable number of bytes, making it more efficient than other encodings. UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII, meaning that ASCII characters are represented in UTF-8 using a single byte, while non-ASCII characters are represented using multiple bytes.

ASCII is a limited character set that only includes English characters, while Unicode is a universal character set that can represent any character from any language. UTF-8 is a character encoding that can represent any Unicode character efficiently.