How Your Computer Knows Where a Character Ends

Description:
Four characters, ten bytes, and each character takes a different number of them. The secret is in the first bits of each byte. A byte that starts with 0 is a whole character.

Full episode: "UTF-8 Explained by Reading the Actual Bytes".

Music: original, Proof in Bytes

Sources:
[1] Demo step E2: code points and bytes - own run, Python 3.14.0. (accessed 2026-10-15). Licence: Own work: output of our own demo script
[2] RFC 3629: UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646 - IETF (F. Yergeau, 2003). (accessed 2026-10-15). Licence: IETF Trust (RFC text)
[3] Demo step E3: decoding by hand - own run, Python 3.14.0. (accessed 2026-10-15). Licence: Own work: output of our own demo script
[4] Demo step E6: resynchronizing - own run, Python 3.14.0. (accessed 2026-10-15). Licence: Own work: output of our own demo script