[the_why_of_y]

What is... oh... UTF-16, the gift that keeps on giving... this is, at the same time, utterly hilarious and horribly depressing:

https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/

But there is actually prior art here - Java's contribution to perverse Unicode encodings is called "Modified UTF-8" and encodes every UTF-16 surrogate code unit separately.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/DataInput.h...