> that's true of Unicode in general. Yes, that was rather my point: if you're using a Unicode-based character encoding, you're going to have variable-width cha

> that's true of Unicode in general. Yes, that was rather my point: if you're using a Unicode-based character encoding, you're going to have variable-width characters regardless, so you might as well use UTF-8. > UCS-2 uses a fixed number of (16-bit) code units to represent a Unicode scalar value (code point). Sure, but that's a implementaion detail of the mapping from characters (at the application level) to bytes (at the physical(-ish) representation level).