Discuss UTF-8 encoding scheme.

UTF-8 is a variable width encoding that can represent every character in Unicode character set. The code unit of UTF-8 is 8 bits called an octet. It uses 1 to maximum 6 octets to represent code points depending on their size i.e. sometimes it uses 8 bits to store the character, other times 16 or 24 or more bits. It is a type of multi-byte encoding.