Why octal notation should be used for UTF-8 (and Unicode)
Summary
This 2016 blog post argues that octal notation can be used to read UTF-8 and Unicode code points directly from byte dumps, without full decoding. It explains how continuation, leading, and ASCII bytes map to octal digits and provides examples using od to illustrate the technique, while noting caveats for multi-byte sequences and edge cases. The piece emphasizes the educational value of this approach and its limitations compared with hexadecimal representations.