That's an interesting point, because of all the languages I prefer working with Unicode (UTF-8) in Lua. This is because I know exactly where I am, there's no u

That's an interesting point, because of all the languages I prefer working with Unicode (UTF-8) in Lua. This is because I know exactly where I am, there's no under-the-hood encoding/decoding to slow down my application, etc. This is a common problem I find in e.g. Python applications. If I need character count instead of byte count, I pull in a unicode library. For most things this is not necessary and unicode strings are just passed through transparently. Finally there are numerous modules and ways to interpret and manipulate unicode strings in Lua, should you actually need that.