yes, that is half of how utf8 works as an encoding: the first byte of a unit is either 0xxxxxxx or 11xxxxxx, in the first it is a single ascii byte and in the s

yes, that is half of how utf8 works as an encoding: the first byte of a unit is either 0xxxxxxx or 11xxxxxx, in the first it is a single ascii byte and in the second case all the following bytes that start with 10xxxxxx are part of the same unit. for this purpose it would be enough to revert the order of the stream.