How many characters can UTF-8 encode?

Question

If UTF-8 is 8 bits, does it not mean that there can be only maximum of 256 different characters?

The first 128 code points are the same as in ASCII. But it says UTF-

Answer 1

Quote from Wikipedia: "UTF-8 encodes each of the 1,112,064 code points in the Unicode character set using one to four 8-bit bytes (termed "octets" in the Unicode Standard)."

Some links:

• http://www.utf-8.com/
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
• http://www.icu-project.org/docs/papers/forms_of_unicode/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8