A character in UTF8 can be from 1 to 4 bytes long, subjected to the following rules:For 1-byte character, the first bit is a 0, followed by its unicode code.For n-bytes character, the first n-bits are all one’s, the n+1 bit is 0, followed by n-1 bytes with most significant 2 bits being 10.
Char. number range(hexadecimal)
UTF-8 octet sequence (binary)
0000 0000-0000 007F
0xxxxxxx
0000 0080-0000 07FF
110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
0000 0800-0000 FFFF
1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
0001 0000-0010 FFFF
11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
is how the UTF-8 encoding would work:
Examples
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Example 1: data = [197, 130, 1], which represents the octet sequence: 110001011000001000000001.
Return true. It is a valid utf-8 encoding for a 2-bytes character followed by a 1-byte character.
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Example 2: data = [235, 140, 4], which represented the octet sequence: 111010111000110000000100.
Return false. The first 3 bits are all one's and the 4th bit is 0 means it is a 3-bytes character. The next byte is a continuation byte which starts with 10 and that's correct. But the second continuation byte does not start with 10, so it is invalid.