A Deep Dive into UTF-8 for BPE Tokenization
A hands-on exploration of UTF-8 encoding, prompted by the need to prepare text for a Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizer. This post breaks down why Unicode characters produce mixed results of readable text and hex codes when encoded, clarifies that all bytes are fundamentally integers, and demystifies the non-continuous ranges in the UTF-8 specification with examples. Features AI-assisted explanations from Gemini and ChatGPT.