“ As a consequence of the design of UTF-8, the following properties of multi-byte sequences hold: * The most significant bit of a single-byte character is always 0. * The most significant bits of the first byte of a multi-byte sequence determine the length of the sequence. These most significant bits are 110 for two-byte sequences; 1110 for three-byte sequences, and so on. * The remaining bytes in a multi-byte sequence have 10 as their two most significant bits. * A UTF-8 stream contains neither the byte FE nor FF. This makes sure that a UTF-8 stream never looks like a UTF-16 stream starting with U+FEFF (Byte-order mark)
UTF-8 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
