Doesn't UTF-8 just give you the exact same letters, since it's already ASCII?

I think it was meant to be UTF-8 escape codes, as in \u0000 etc.

Pedantry: These are really Unicode escape codes not UTF-8 escape codes, since they're codes for Unicode code points. You can write invalid UTF-16 with these escapes (because unlike UTF-8 the UTF-16 encoding actually borrows Unicode code points that are not scalar values, called the "surrogates") but I don't know what the standard says should happen if you do that.

Ahh that makes sense, thanks.