Basic Latin
Basic Latin in character encoding
Basic Latin is Unicode block U+0000 to U+007F - the first 128 code points, identical to ASCII. Unicode deliberately made this block a 1:1 copy so that any valid ASCII text is also valid UTF-8 without modification. The bytes are identical.
This backward compatibility is why UTF-8 succeeded where other Unicode encodings struggled: existing ASCII systems could process UTF-8 text without changes as long as the content stayed within Basic Latin. Characters beyond this block (U+0080+) require multi-byte sequences in UTF-8 and fall into blocks like Latin-1 Supplement, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. Browse all 128 Basic Latin characters on our ASCII table.
This backward compatibility is why UTF-8 succeeded where other Unicode encodings struggled: existing ASCII systems could process UTF-8 text without changes as long as the content stayed within Basic Latin. Characters beyond this block (U+0080+) require multi-byte sequences in UTF-8 and fall into blocks like Latin-1 Supplement, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. Browse all 128 Basic Latin characters on our ASCII table.