2.3.2 Multi-byte Integers

Multi-byte integers MUST represent unsigned values and use variable length storage to represent numbers. Each byte stores 7 bits of the integer. The high-order bit of each byte indicates whether the following byte is a part of the integer. If the high-order bit is set, the lower seven bits are used and a next byte MUST be consumed. If a byte has the high-order bit cleared (meaning that the value of the byte is less than 0x80) then that byte is the last byte of the integer. The least significant byte (LSB) of the integer appears first.

The following table shows the number of bytes used to store a value in a certain range:

Range from	Range to	Encoding used
0x00000000	0x0000007F	1 byte
0x00000080	0x00003FFF	2 bytes, LSB stored first
0x00004000	0x001FFFFF	3 bytes, LSB stored first
0x00200000	0x0FFFFFFF	4 bytes, LSB stored first
0x10000000	0x7FFFFFFF	5 bytes, LSB stored first

For mb32 integers the resulting number MUST fit into a signed 32bit integer.

For mb64 integers the resulting number MUST fit into a signed 64bit integer. A parser or writer MAY<10> choose to limit the valid range of the resulting number even more.