Yes, basically. UTF-8 doesn't encode a code point as a single integer; it encodes it as a sequence of bytes, with a particular order, where some of the bits are

Yes, basically. UTF-8 doesn't encode a code point as a single integer; it encodes it as a sequence of bytes, with a particular order, where some of the bits are used to represent the code point, and some of them are just used to represent whether you are looking at an initial byte or a continuation byte. I'd recommend checking out the description of UTF-8 in Wikipdia. The tables make it fairly clear how the encoding works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description