Malformed UTF-8 reports the first failing byte boundary
The validator distinguishes invalid leading/continuation bytes, truncation, overlong forms, surrogate encodings and values beyond U+10FFFF.
Parse complete hex bytes and use a fatal UTF-8 decoder to distinguish valid sequences from malformed byte input.
These tools operate on bytes and Unicode text locally. “Text to hex/binary/decimal” means the UTF-8 encoding of the text, not the numeric Unicode code point unless a tool explicitly says code point.
The validator distinguishes invalid leading/continuation bytes, truncation, overlong forms, surrogate encodings and values beyond U+10FFFF.