diff --git a/run.c b/run.c
index bf4ce34..da1fbc4 100644
--- a/run.c
+++ b/run.c
@@ -380,7 +380,7 @@ typedef struct {
     TokenIndex *sorted_vocab;
     int vocab_size;
     unsigned int max_token_length;
-    char byte_piece[2];
+    unsigned char byte_pieces[512]; // stores all single-byte strings
 } Tokenizer;
 
 int compare_tokens(const void *a, const void *b) {
@@ -393,8 +393,11 @@ void build_tokenizer(Tokenizer* t, char* tokenizer_path, int vocab_size) {
     // malloc space to hold the scores and the strings
     t->vocab = (char**)malloc(vocab_size * sizeof(char*));
     t->vocab_scores = (float*)malloc(vocab_size * sizeof(float));
-    t->byte_piece[1] = '\0'; // null terminate the byte_piece string
     t->sorted_vocab = NULL; // initialized lazily
+    for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++) {
+        t->byte_pieces[i * 2] = (unsigned char)i;
+        t->byte_pieces[i * 2 + 1] = '\0';
+    }
     // read in the file
     FILE *file = fopen(tokenizer_path, "rb");
     if (!file) { fprintf(stderr, "couldn't load %s\n", tokenizer_path); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); }
@@ -422,18 +425,28 @@ char* decode(Tokenizer* t, int prev_token, int token) {
     // following BOS (1) token, sentencepiece decoder strips any leading whitespace (see PR #89)
     if (prev_token == 1 && piece[0] == ' ') { piece++; }
     // careful, some tokens designate raw bytes, and look like e.g. '<0x01>'
+    // parse this and convert and return the actual byte
     unsigned char byte_val;
     if (sscanf(piece, "<0x%02hhX>", &byte_val) == 1) {
-        // ok this token is a raw byte token, careful to only print printable chars or whitespace
-        // some of the other bytes can be various control codes, backspace, etc. => skip
-        if (isprint(byte_val) || isspace(byte_val)) {
-            t->byte_piece[0] = byte_val;
-            piece = &t->byte_piece[0];
-        }
+        piece = (char*)t->byte_pieces + byte_val * 2;
     }
     return piece;
 }
 
+void safe_printf(char *piece) {
+    // piece might be a raw byte token, and we only want to print printable chars or whitespace
+    // because some of the other bytes can be various control codes, backspace, etc.
+    if (piece == NULL) { return; }
+    if (piece[0] == '\0') { return; }
+    if (piece[1] == '\0') {
+        unsigned char byte_val = piece[0];
+        if (!(isprint(byte_val) || isspace(byte_val))) {
+            return; // bad byte, don't print it
+        }
+    }
+    printf("%s", piece);
+}
+
 int str_lookup(char *str, TokenIndex *sorted_vocab, int vocab_size) {
     // efficiently find the perfect match for str in vocab, return its index or -1 if not found
     TokenIndex tok = { .str = str }; // acts as the key to search for
@@ -754,7 +767,7 @@ void generate(Transformer *transformer, Tokenizer *tokenizer, Sampler *sampler,
 
         // print the token as string, decode it with the Tokenizer object
         char* piece = decode(tokenizer, token, next);
-        printf("%s", piece);
+        safe_printf(piece); // same as printf("%s", piece), but skips "unsafe" bytes
         fflush(stdout);
         token = next;