Partial buffer writes

I'm looking through the node Buffer documentation in detail, and I can't get my head around the explanation for buffer.write().

Specifically, I don't get what the behaviour is when a write attempt is performed with string larger than the buffer's capacity. The following passage seems to contradict itself:

If buffer did not contain enough space to fit the entire string, it will write a partial amount of the string. length defaults to buffer.length - offset. The method will not write partial characters.

The first sentence claims it will write what it can, while the last one says it's an all-or-nothing operation.

Am I missing something?

In certain encodings (like UTF-8) a single character can be represented by multiple bytes.

When the documentation says "The method will not write partial characters" I think they mean that if a characters needs 3 bytes but there are only 2 bytes left on the buffer the character won't be written at all (as opposed to only writing the first 2 bytes)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8