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LeetCode 393, Medium. Topics: Array, Bit Manipulation. View on LeetCode. Generate this problem as a practice environment: tested reference solution, 20 parametrized pytest cases, and a playground notebook:

Problem

Given an integer array data representing the data, return whether it is a valid UTF-8 encoding (i.e. it translates to a sequence of valid UTF-8 encoded characters). A character in UTF8 can be from 1 to 4 bytes long, subjected to the following rules:
  1. For a 1-byte character, the first bit is a 0, followed by its Unicode code.
  2. For an n-bytes character, the first n bits are all one’s, the n + 1 bit is 0, followed by n - 1 bytes with the most significant 2 bits being 10.
This is how the UTF-8 encoding would work:
x denotes a bit in the binary form of a byte that may be either 0 or 1. Note: The input is an array of integers. Only the least significant 8 bits of each integer is used to store the data. This means each integer represents only 1 byte of data.

Examples

Constraints

  • 1 <= data.length <= 2 * 10^4
  • 0 <= data[i] <= 255

Solution

Reference implementation from solution.py on GitHub, full suite in test_solution.py:

Complexity

Tags

Last modified on September 7, 2026