Leetcode 393. UTF-8 Validation

Problem

Given an integer array data representing the data, return whether it is a valid UTF-8 encoding (i.e. it translates to a sequence of valid UTF-8 encoded characters).

A character in UTF8 can be from 1 to 4 bytes long, subjected to the following rules:

1. For a 1-byte character, the first bit is a 0, followed by its Unicode code.
2. For an n-bytes character, the first n bits are all one’s, the n + 1 bit is 0, followed by n - 1 bytes with the most significant 2 bits being 10.

This is how the UTF-8 encoding would work:

Number of Bytes	UTF-8 Octet Sequence (binary)
1	0xxxxxxx
2	110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
3	1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
4	11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

x denotes a bit in the binary form of a byte that may be either 0 or 1.

Note: The input is an array of integers. Only the least significant 8 bits of each integer is used to store the data. This means each integer represents only 1 byte of data.

Algorithm

Just determine each type based on the definition.

Code

class Solution:
    def validUtf8(self, data: List[int]) -> bool:
        bytes_size, current_pos = 0, 0 
        for byte in data:
            if 0 == bytes_size:
                if byte < 128: # 0xxxxxxx 
                    bytes_size, current_pos = 0, 0
                elif byte >= 192 and byte < 224: # 110xxxxx
                    bytes_size, current_pos = 1, 1
                elif byte >= 224 and byte < 240: # 1110xxxx
                    bytes_size, current_pos = 2, 2
                elif byte >= 240 and byte < 248: # 11110xxx
                    bytes_size, current_pos = 3, 3
                else:
                    return False
            else:
                if byte >= 128 and byte < 192:
                    current_pos = current_pos - 1
                else:
                    return False
                if 0 == current_pos:
                    bytes_size = 0
        
        return 0 == bytes_size