UTF-8 character change to two character

Question

Hi,

In my text file, I used a character with value larger than 127 for example 0xDC. Then I loaded that text file in a device. Then I read that text file and that character. Then the character was changed to 0xC3 and 0x9C. How come it change to two character?

Thanks

Answer 1

Because that's the sequence for the character when encoded in UTF-8:

>>> '\xc3\x9c'.decode('utf-8')
u'\xdc'

Answer 2

From wikipedia:

"UTF-8 encodes each character (code point) in 1 to 4 octets (8-bit bytes), with the single octet encoding used only for the 128 US-ASCII characters."