You're not a terrible programmer, just an uninformed and/or slightly Anglocentric one. Just last week, my co-worker had to waste two days debugging a two-year-

You're not a terrible programmer, just an uninformed and/or slightly Anglocentric one. Just last week, my co-worker had to waste two days debugging a two-year-old Sphinx setup (the person who implemented it no longer works with us) because a Japanese user of our blogging service wasn't seeing the post he was looking for in our search feature. The problem was that the conduit feeding the Sphinx indexer was handling Unicode incorrectly (to be specific, it was deleting certain bytes wholesale because this guy believed them never to be valid, and this broke multi-byte sequences horribly). Those two days would have been much better spent working on his current project. Additionally, not handling Unicode correctly can leave you open to certain types of security holes! The biggest of these is probably that Unicode means _a string is not an array of bytes_, so naïve allocators for languages with byte-array strings (read: C and its brethren) are susceptible to buffer overruns when handed multi-byte Unicode sequences when they're expecting ASCII. Here's another one: the Unicode character space contains many, many glyphs that look almost (or in some cases exactly) like ASCII characters. RFC 3492 defines a framework for internationalized domain names (IDN) that encodes non-ASCII code points using ASCII characters, and the most common implementations of this transparently go between the two. This means that you could register "bаnkofamerica.com" (actually xn--bnkofamerica-x9j.com) and put a phishing site there, and people would happily click on the identical-looking URL and give you their bank account. This was pointed out several years ago and most modern browsers have mechanisms in place to defend against it, but your custom application might not unless you're careful to check what you're doing. There are plenty of blog posts and articles out there designed to tell you how to be safe when dealing with Unicode (and you should assume that you will be). I highly suggest you go read one.