Recommending that people manipulate utf-8 directly is a bad idea for lots of reasons. It's fairly easy to end up with mixed normalizations and lots of other th

Recommending that people manipulate utf-8 directly is a bad idea for lots of reasons. It's fairly easy to end up with mixed normalizations and lots of other things which will come back to bite you. Just about everything, including GNU command line utilities, support proper unicode handling, why would you want to go back into the stone ages of dealing with bytes directly?