Errm, no. From the Wikipedia article on UTF-8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 "The standard specifies that the correct encoding of a code point uses only the minimum number of bytes required to hold the significant bits of the code point. Longer encodings are called overlong and are not valid UTF-8 representations of the code point. This rule maintains a one-to-one correspondence between code points and their valid encodings, so that there is a unique valid encoding for each code point. This ensures that string comparisons and searches are well-defined." The minimum number of bytes to encode a null is one.