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Are lemniscates, ∞, allowed in UTF-8 Encoded files?

I am hoping that students with less than six months of computer programming experience can use a search engine to type something like "is infinity a valid UTF-8 character", and that they will find this answer.

dhag
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Samuel Muldoon
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  • Hi Samuel, welcome here! Nice having you around :) Not 100% sure whether your question is actually related to Unix/Linux, but seeing you already got two correct answers, I guess it's fine. You can represent any Unicode character in UTF-8. Unless you're designing new alphabets or are doing linguistic/archaelogical research on niche texts, chances are every character you want to use already has a Unicode "Code Point". UTF-8 is just the standard how to take a bunch of these code points (i.e., text), and store them in a buffer. – Marcus Müller May 29 '23 at 09:00

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If you managed to type it here without an image then it is valid utf8. That's because stackexchange pages are all UTF8 encoded.

Incidentally the google search would be more like "Unicode infinity character". Since UTF8 is just an encoding of unicode.

Philip Couling
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While the Infinity symbol is indeed part of The Unicode Standard and thus can be encoded by UTF-8, it may be noteworthy that lemniscates describe a group of shapes some of which do not resemble the infinity symbol visually.

Hermann
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