It's easier than you think... utf-8 guarantees that all bytes of a multi-byte character have the high bit set. 0x3B (semicolon) does not have the high bit s

It's easier than you think... utf-8 guarantees that all bytes of a multi-byte character have the high bit set. 0x3B (semicolon) does not have the high bit set. Therefore 0x3B is guaranteed to be your seperator. The same logic applies to newline - therefore, you can jump into the middle of the file anywhere and guarantee to be able to synchronize.