Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit (UTF-8)

UTF-8 is a Unicode character encoding that maps each symbol to one, two, three, or four bytes.

For example, the Euro sign, €, corresponds to the three bytes 11100010 10000010 10101100. The rules for mapping characters are as follows:

• For a single-byte character, the first bit must be zero.
• For an n-byte character, the first byte starts with n ones and a zero. The other n - 1 bytes all start with 10.

Visually, this can be represented as follows.

 Bytes   |           Byte format
-----------------------------------------------
   1     | 0xxxxxxx
   2     | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
   3     | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
   4     | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx