diff --git a/run.c b/run.c
index 37d3018..8f565cd 100644
--- a/run.c
+++ b/run.c
@@ -358,10 +358,10 @@ int compare_tokens(const void *a, const void *b) {
 }
 
 int str_lookup(char *str, TokenIndex *sorted_vocab, int vocab_size) {
-    // find the perfect match for str in vocab, return its index or -1 if not found
-    TokenIndex tok = {str=str};
+    // 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
     TokenIndex *res = bsearch(&tok, sorted_vocab, vocab_size, sizeof(TokenIndex), compare_tokens);
-    return res!=NULL ? res->id : -1;
+    return res != NULL ? res->id : -1;
 }
 
 void bpe_encode(char *text, char **vocab, float *vocab_scores, int vocab_size, unsigned int max_token_length, int *tokens, int *n_tokens) {
@@ -374,7 +374,7 @@ void bpe_encode(char *text, char **vocab, float *vocab_scores, int vocab_size, u
     }
     qsort(sorted_vocab, vocab_size, sizeof(TokenIndex), compare_tokens);
 
-    // a temporary buffer to merge two consecutive tokens
+    // create a temporary buffer that will store merge candidates of always two consecutive tokens
     char* str_buffer = malloc((max_token_length*2+1) * sizeof(char)); // *2 for concat, +1 for null terminator
     size_t str_len = 0;
 
@@ -382,25 +382,48 @@ void bpe_encode(char *text, char **vocab, float *vocab_scores, int vocab_size, u
     tokens[0] = str_lookup(" ", sorted_vocab, vocab_size);
     *n_tokens = 1; // the number of tokens
 
-    // first encode every individual byte in the input string
-    for (char *c = text; *c != '\0'; c++) {
-        // reset buffer if the current byte is ASCII or leading byte
-        if ((*c & 0xC0) != 0x80)
-            str_len = 0;
+    // Okay UTF-8 time. This will get messy. Here is the reference from Wikipedia:
+    // Code point ↔ UTF-8 conversion
+    // First code point	Last code point	Byte 1	Byte 2	Byte 3	Byte 4
+    // U+0000	U+007F	    0xxxxxxx
+    // U+0080	U+07FF	    110xxxxx	10xxxxxx
+    // U+0800	U+FFFF	    1110xxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx
+    // U+10000	U+10FFFF    11110xxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx
 
-        str_buffer[str_len++] = *c;   // append byte to the buffer
+    // process the raw (UTF-8) byte sequence of the input string
+    for (char *c = text; *c != '\0'; c++) {
+
+        // reset buffer if the current byte is ASCII or a leading byte
+        // 0xC0 is 11000000, so (*c & 0xC0) keeps the first 2 bits and zeros the rest
+        // 0x80 is 10000000
+        // in UTF-8, all continuation bytes start with "10" in first two bits
+        // so in English this is: "if this byte is not a continuation byte"
+        if ((*c & 0xC0) != 0x80) {
+            // this byte must be either a leading byte (11...) or an ASCII char (0x...)
+            // => reset our location, as we're starting a new UTF-8 codepoint
+            str_len = 0;
+        }
+
+        // append the current byte to the buffer
+        str_buffer[str_len++] = *c; // ++ is post-increment, incremented after this line
         str_buffer[str_len] = '\0';
 
-        if ((*(c+1) & 0xC0) == 0x80)  // skip if in middle of multi-byte utf8 encoding
+        // while the next character is a continuation byte, continue appending
+        if ((*(c+1) & 0xC0) == 0x80) {
             continue;
+        }
 
+        // ok c+1 is not a continuation byte, so we've read in a full codepoint
         int id = str_lookup(str_buffer, sorted_vocab, vocab_size);
 
         if (id != -1) {
+            // we found this codepoint in vocab, add it as a token
             tokens[(*n_tokens)++] = id;
         } else {
-            // byte_fallback encoding
-            for (int i=0; i<str_len; i++) {
+            // byte_fallback encoding: just encode each byte as a token
+            // +3 is here because the first 3 vocab elements are <unk>, <s>, </s>
+            // so the individual bytes only start at index 3
+            for (int i=0; i < str_len; i++) {
                 tokens[(*n_tokens)++] = (unsigned char)str_buffer[i] + 3;
             }
         }