How does a file with Chinese characters know how many bytes to use per character?

Question

I have read Joel\'s article \"The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)\" but still don\'

Answer 1

The hint is in this sentence here:

In UTF-8, every code point from 0-127 is stored in a single byte. Only code points 128 and above are stored using 2, 3, in fact, up to 6 bytes.

Every code point up to 127 has the top bit set to zero. Therefore, the editor knows that if it encounters a byte where the top bit is a 1, it is the start of a multi-byte character.