> What I wanted to get at is that in Unicode, I have a chance to count letters to some useful degree. You do not. You merely happen to get the right answer by

> What I wanted to get at is that in Unicode, I have a chance to count letters to some useful degree. You do not. You merely happen to get the right answer by coincidence in some cases, same as bytes-that-probably-are(n't)-ASCII. To throw your own words back at you: "Åström" is 6 code points in Unicode "Åström" is 8 code points in Unicode If your software tells the user that one is six and the other is 8 letters long, it is not "less correct". It is incorrect. Further, if searching for "Åström" won't find "Åström", your software is less useful than it could be if it knew text. (And it's sad how often software gets this wrong.)