A recent project called for importing data into an Oracle database. The program that will do this is a C# .Net 3.5 app and I\'m using the Oracle.DataAccess connection libra
If a UTF-8 byte has a zero-valued high order bit, it's the beginning of a character. If its high order bit is 1, it's in the 'middle' of a character. The ability to detect the beginning of a character was an explicit design goal of UTF-8.
Check out the Description section of the wikipedia article for more detail.