Which encoding method is widely used in modern applications to represent characters from all languages?

The correct answer is UTF-8, as it is a variable-length character encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode character set, which encompasses characters from virtually all written languages. UTF-8 has become the dominant character encoding for the web and other modern applications because it is capable of encoding any character that exists in Unicode, allowing for a diverse range of symbols and alphabets to be represented seamlessly.

One of the key advantages of UTF-8 is its backward compatibility with ASCII. This means that any standard ASCII text is also valid UTF-8 text, and this facilitates easier integration of legacy systems and data. Additionally, UTF-8 is efficient in terms of storage, as it uses one byte for the standard ASCII characters and can expand up to four bytes for more complex characters. This flexibility makes it ideal for applications that require a global reach and support for multilingual content.

In contrast, ISO-8859-1 is limited to Western European languages and cannot represent characters from other languages or scripts. ASCII is even more restrictive, as it only encodes 128 characters, which are primarily English letters and symbols, making it inadequate for international use. Binary refers to a low-level representation of data in terms of bits and bytes, and while it is fundamental