Validating UTF-8 In Less Than One Instruction Per Byte

TL;DR

This paper introduces a highly efficient UTF-8 validation algorithm that leverages SIMD instructions to outperform existing routines by over ten times, and is openly available as open source software.

Contribution

The authors present a novel SIMD-based lookup algorithm for UTF-8 validation that significantly improves performance over existing methods.

Findings

Validation routine is over 10 times faster than existing implementations

Algorithm is freely available as open source software

Utilizes SIMD instructions for high efficiency

Abstract

The majority of text is stored in UTF-8, which must be validated on ingestion. We present the lookup algorithm, which outperforms UTF-8 validation routines used in many libraries and languages by more than 10 times using commonly available SIMD instructions. To ensure reproducibility, our work is freely available as open source software.