> Can't each character be up to 8 bytes long I don't think so. Not to point you to the wiki again but [0]. That's a pretty good description of how it works, so

> Can't each character be up to 8 bytes long I don't think so. Not to point you to the wiki again but [0]. That's a pretty good description of how it works, so you don't get to use the all of the bits in the first byte to describe how long the character is in bytes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description