<ul>
<li>If the character can be expressed in 7 bits, it will be. There's no difference from a pure ASCII string and a UTF-8 string containing those characters.</li>
<li>If the character needs up to 11 bits, it will be spread across 2 bytes with padding.</li>
<li>The padding indicates that this is one codepoint spread across two characters, not 2 1-byte codepoints.</li>
<li>Take á. It corresponds to 225. Or '00011100001' in binary.</li>
<li>With padding this becomes the 2 bytes '110 00011' and '10 100001'.</li>
<li>Unicode aware systems will render these two bytes as as á.</li>
<li>Unaware systems will interpret each byte as a separate codepoint and print ��.</li>
</ul>
For codepoints that need 12-16 bits will be spread across 3 bytes. And codepoints 17-21 bits will be spread across 4 bytes.
<img src="/unicode.png" alt="Unicode Padding">
Source - <a href="https://sethmlarson.dev/blog/utf-8">How does UTF-8 turn “😂” into “F09F9882”?</a>


If the character can be expressed in 7 bits, it will be. There's no difference from a pure ASCII string and a UTF-8 string containing those characters.
If the character needs up to 11 bits, it will be spread across 2 bytes with padding.
The padding indicates that this is one codepoint spread across two characters, not 2 1-byte codepoints.
Take á. It corresponds to 225. Or '00011100001' in binary.
With padding this becomes the 2 bytes '110 00011' and '10 100001'.
Unicode aware systems will render these two bytes as as á.
Unaware systems will interpret each byte as a separate codepoint and print ��.

For codepoints that need 12-16 bits will be spread across 3 bytes. And codepoints 17-21 bits will be spread across 4 bytes.

Source - How does UTF-8 turn “😂” into “F09F9882”?
