The most valuable property of UTF-8 from a C-string point of view is that it guarantees there are no embedded NULs in a UTF-8 string. If you naively put the by

The most valuable property of UTF-8 from a C-string point of view is that it guarantees there are no embedded NULs in a UTF-8 string. If you naively put the bytes of UTF-16 or UTF-32 encodings into a buffer, they might contain NUL (zero) byte values. Which, for C strings, means "end of string". UTF-8 makes sure this doesn't happen, which makes it compatible with existing C string functions.