花花酱 LeetCode 393. UTF-8 Validation

A character in UTF8 can be from 1 to 4 bytes long, subjected to the following rules:

1. For 1-byte character, the first bit is a 0, followed by its unicode code.
2. For n-bytes character, the first n-bits are all one’s, the n+1 bit is 0, followed by n-1 bytes with most significant 2 bits being 10.

This is how the UTF-8 encoding would work:

Given an array of integers representing the data, return whether it is a valid utf-8 encoding.

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.

Example 1:

data = [197, 130, 1], which represents the octet sequence: 11000101 10000010 00000001.

Return true.
It is a valid utf-8 encoding for a 2-bytes character followed by a 1-byte character.

Example 2:

data = [235, 140, 4], which represented the octet sequence: 11101011 10001100 00000100.

Return false.
The first 3 bits are all one's and the 4th bit is 0 means it is a 3-bytes character.
The next byte is a continuation byte which starts with 10 and that's correct.
But the second continuation byte does not start with 10, so it is invalid.

Solution: Bit Operation

Check the first byte of a character and find out the number of bytes (from 0 to 3) left to check. The left bytes must start with 0b10.

Time complexity: O(n)
Space complexity: O(1)