diff --git a/run.c b/run.c
index 02cc877..f69c21a 100644
--- a/run.c
+++ b/run.c
@@ -356,15 +356,34 @@ void bpe_encode(char *text, char **vocab, float *vocab_scores, int vocab_size, u
 
     // a temporary buffer to merge 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;
+
+    // add_dummy_prefix is true by default
+    tokens[0] = str_lookup(" ", vocab, vocab_size);
+    *n_tokens = 1; // the number of tokens
 
     // first encode every individual byte in the input string
-    *n_tokens = 0; // the number of tokens
     for (char *c = text; *c != '\0'; c++) {
-        sprintf(str_buffer, "%c", *c);
+        // reset buffer if the current byte is ASCII or leading byte
+        if ((*c & 0xC0) != 0x80)
+            str_len = 0;
+
+        str_buffer[str_len++] = *c;   // append byte to the buffer
+        str_buffer[str_len] = '\0';
+
+        if ((*(c+1) & 0xC0) == 0x80)  // skip if in middle of multi-byte utf8 encoding
+            continue;
+
         int id = str_lookup(str_buffer, vocab, vocab_size);
-        if (id == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "not good\n"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); }
-        tokens[*n_tokens] = id;
-        (*n_tokens)++;
+
+        if (id != -1) {
+            tokens[(*n_tokens)++] = id;
+        } else {
+            // byte_fallback encoding
+            for (int i=0; i<str_len; i++) {
+                tokens[(*n_tokens)++] = (unsigned char)str_buffer[i] + 3;
+            }
+        }
     }
 
     // merge the best consecutive pair each iteration, according the scores in vocab_scores
@@ -401,6 +420,19 @@ void bpe_encode(char *text, char **vocab, float *vocab_scores, int vocab_size, u
     free(str_buffer);
 }
 
+// convert token to printable string
+char *token_to_str(char **vocab, int token, int prev_token) {
+    // following BOS (1) token, sentencepiece decoder strips any leading whitespace (see PR #89)
+    char *token_str = (prev_token == 1 && vocab[token][0] == ' ') ? vocab[token]+1 : vocab[token];
+    // make '<0x01>' into '\x01'
+    static char byte_piece[4];
+    if (sscanf(token_str, "<0x%02X>", (int*)(&byte_piece)) == 1) {
+        byte_piece[1] = '\0';
+        token_str = byte_piece;
+    }
+    return token_str;
+}
+
 // ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 // utilities: time / rng
 
@@ -637,9 +669,7 @@ int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
         // data-dependent terminating condition: the BOS (1) token delimits sequences
         if (next == 1) { break; }
 
-        // following BOS (1) token, sentencepiece decoder strips any leading whitespace (see PR #89)
-        char *token_str = (token == 1 && vocab[next][0] == ' ') ? vocab[next]+1 : vocab[next];
-        printf("%s", token_str);
+        printf("%s", token_to_str(vocab, next, token));
         fflush(stdout);
         token = next;
 
diff --git a/tokenizer.bin b/tokenizer.bin
index e0a8a7b..e6c1b23 100644
Binary files a/tokenizer.bin and b/tokenizer.bin differ
diff --git a/tokenizer.py b/tokenizer.py
index 35eee20..bbe1bc9 100644
--- a/tokenizer.py
+++ b/tokenizer.py
@@ -52,8 +52,6 @@ class Tokenizer:
                 t = '\n<s>\n'
             elif i == self.eos_id:
                 t = '\n</s>\n'
-            elif len(t) == 6 and t.startswith('<0x') and t.endswith('>'):
-                t = chr(int(t[3:5], 16)) # e.g. make '<0x01>' into '\x01'
             t = t.replace('▁', ' ') # sentencepiece uses this character as whitespace
             b = t.encode('utf-8') # bytes of this token, utf-8 encoded