How is binary delimited?

[Adam]

Hi guys,

My first post here, sorry if this is a completely stupid question.

I've just been reading some stuff about multi-byte characters and how say the UTF-8 character set can require as much as 6 bytes to store a single character. If that's the case though, how does the machine know where one character ends and the next starts? How are they delimited from one another?

Thanks

Adam

 

[Celegorm]

Typically speaking, they still have all 8 bits. The difference is that the first 2 bits are left as zeros.

If you feel creative, you can write a program to take in any character formatted in UTF8 and have it print out the binary but that might be over kill.