What is character encoding?

Answer 1

a notation for storing and sharing list of actual binary values for each character we use , that's it
utf8 uses 8bits to store characters hence you can store 2^8 characters.
utf16 uses 16 bits to represent characters ,
hence you can store 2^16 characters.

for example 'Z' is stored as 90 in binary i.e. 01011010 in utf-8 encoding format

Answer 2

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding