Example invalid utf8 string?

Take a look at Markus Kuhn's UTF-8 decoder capability and stress test file

You'll find examples of many UTF-8 irregularities, including lonely start bytes, continuation bytes missing, overlong sequences, etc.

In PHP:

$examples = array(
    'Valid ASCII' => "a",
    'Valid 2 Octet Sequence' => "\xc3\xb1",
    'Invalid 2 Octet Sequence' => "\xc3\x28",
    'Invalid Sequence Identifier' => "\xa0\xa1",
    'Valid 3 Octet Sequence' => "\xe2\x82\xa1",
    'Invalid 3 Octet Sequence (in 2nd Octet)' => "\xe2\x28\xa1",
    'Invalid 3 Octet Sequence (in 3rd Octet)' => "\xe2\x82\x28",
    'Valid 4 Octet Sequence' => "\xf0\x90\x8c\xbc",
    'Invalid 4 Octet Sequence (in 2nd Octet)' => "\xf0\x28\x8c\xbc",
    'Invalid 4 Octet Sequence (in 3rd Octet)' => "\xf0\x90\x28\xbc",
    'Invalid 4 Octet Sequence (in 4th Octet)' => "\xf0\x28\x8c\x28",
    'Valid 5 Octet Sequence (but not Unicode!)' => "\xf8\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1",
    'Valid 6 Octet Sequence (but not Unicode!)' => "\xfc\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1",
);

From http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php#54805

The idea of patterns of ill-formed byte-sequences can be gotten from the table of well-formed byte sequences. See "Table 3-7. Well-Formed UTF-8 Byte Sequences" in the Unicode Standard 6.2.

    Code Points    First Byte Second Byte Third Byte Fourth Byte
  U+0000 -   U+007F   00 - 7F
  U+0080 -   U+07FF   C2 - DF    80 - BF
  U+0800 -   U+0FFF   E0         A0 - BF     80 - BF
  U+1000 -   U+CFFF   E1 - EC    80 - BF     80 - BF
  U+D000 -   U+D7FF   ED         80 - 9F     80 - BF
  U+E000 -   U+FFFF   EE - EF    80 - BF     80 - BF
 U+10000 -  U+3FFFF   F0         90 - BF     80 - BF    80 - BF
 U+40000 -  U+FFFFF   F1 - F3    80 - BF     80 - BF    80 - BF
U+100000 - U+10FFFF   F4         80 - 8F     80 - BF    80 - BF

Here are the examples generated from U+24B62. I used them for a bug report: Bug #65045 mb_convert_encoding breaks well-formed character

// U+24B62: "\xF0\xA4\xAD\xA2"
"\xF0\xA4\xAD"    ."\xF0\xA4\xAD\xA2"."\xF0\xA4\xAD\xA2"
"\xF0\xA4\xAD\xA2"."\xF0\xA4\xAD\xA2"."\xF0\xA4\xAD"

The oversimplification of range of trailing bytes([0x80, 0xBF]) can be seen in the various libraries.

// U+0800 - U+0FFF
\xE0\x80\x80

// U+D000 - U+D7FF
\xED\xBF\xBF

// U+10000 -  U+3FFFF
\xF0\x80\x80\x80

// U+100000 - U+10FFFF
\xF4\xBF\xBF\xBF

,̆ was particularly evil. I see it as combined on ubuntu.

comma-breve

This might not be exactly what OP asked but it's somewhat related :

if you happen to already have byte ordinance values (0 - 255) and wanna know whether a byte# is a valid UTF-8 starting point byte or not, I came up with this strange unified formula that returns a 1 (true) or 0 (false) :

function newUTF8start(__) {  

   return 118^(+__< 194) < (246-__)  }

Fuzz Testing - generate a random sequence of octets. Most likely you'll get some illegal sequences sooner than later.