UTF-8 / UTF-16 Inspector

The UTF-8/UTF-16 Inspector shows the exact byte sequence that any piece of text produces under UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding, along with the Unicode code point for each character. Understanding these byte-level details matters when debugging character encoding errors, validating data pipelines that pass text between systems, or investigating why a string displays as garbled boxes or question marks. The tool accepts any text and displays each character's hex and decimal byte values side by side, making it straightforward to compare how the same character occupies one byte in ASCII-compatible UTF-8 but two bytes in UTF-16, or why an emoji requires four bytes in UTF-8 and a surrogate pair in UTF-16.

This UTF inspector analyzes your text input and displays its byte-level representation in different encoding formats. Simply enter any text into the input field and select your preferred analysis format: UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 bytes, or UTF-8 code points. The tool processes each character according to the selected encoding standard and displays the results in both hexadecimal (0x format) and decimal formats. For UTF-8 code points, it also shows the Unicode representation (U+ format) along with the actual character, making it easy to understand how complex characters are stored.

UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding that uses 1 to 4 bytes per character, optimized for backward compatibility with ASCII. ASCII characters use 1 byte, while other characters use 2, 3, or 4 bytes depending on their code point value. UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for most characters (the Basic Multilingual Plane) and 4 bytes for characters outside that range (surrogate pairs). The tool correctly identifies multi-byte sequences and displays each byte individually, helping you understand encoding efficiency and detect potential encoding issues. Code point analysis shows the actual Unicode value for each character, independent of encoding.

This tool shows theoretical encoding representations and may not match exactly how specific systems store text due to Byte Order Mark (BOM) handling, endianness differences, or platform-specific implementations. Some systems may use different normalization forms for Unicode text, affecting byte representation. The tool assumes standard UTF-8 and UTF-16 BE (Big Endian) encoding for consistency. Actual file storage may include additional metadata or use different byte orders than shown.

Encoding mismatches are one of the most common sources of corrupted text in software systems. A string written as UTF-8 but read as Latin-1, or a UTF-16 file missing its byte order mark, can produce a cascade of garbled output that is difficult to trace without knowing the expected byte pattern. The UTF-8/UTF-16 Inspector gives you the ground truth for any character or string: the specific byte values that the encoding standard requires. Compare the inspector output against what your system is actually producing to pinpoint where the mismatch occurs. For characters above U+007F, pay particular attention to byte count differences between UTF-8 and UTF-16, since these are the most common source of off-by-one errors and truncation bugs in text processing code.