👉 Okay, letās tackle this frankly rather prickly beast of a word, affectionately nicknamed "Utf8Num.ā Now, I'm not kidding when I say this is the kind of thing you stumble upon during late nights wrestling with obscure technical documentation and then immediately forget about until it resurfaces again.
Basically, an "Utf8Num" isnāt actuallyā¦ a number. Unless, perhaps, you have a very weird definition of what constitutes a number. Instead, it's essentially the textual representation, when encoded in UTF-16 (the fancy, hyphenated way computers store text ā really, who names these things anyway?) that would normally be a numerical 0. You wouldnāt normally think about this; we just treat 0 as 0. But, because of how UTF is physically laid out in the bits and bytes, the sequence of hexadecimal characters representing that zero has anā¦ unsettling quality. Let's unpack it. UTF-16 uses a system where the digit "0", when converted into its UTF-8 equivalent for writing, is actually a pair of hexadecimal digits: 00. And, I'll be perfectly frankāthe sight of that 00 in the machine and frankly the fact it exists at all just makes you feelā¦ slightly off. The weirdness stems from how the underlying encoding scheme messes with your gut. Think of it as a little digital shrug. UTF-8Num is therefore the, let'
