Even that doesn't make any sense, because refusing to encode characters that require four bytes doesn't save any space; it just makes it impossible to encode th

Even that doesn't make any sense, because refusing to encode characters that require four bytes doesn't save any space; it just makes it impossible to encode those characters. Nothing about the other encoding lengths changes. The only thing I can figure is that something somewhere is using a 16-bit quantity for decoded codepoints. Four-byte encodings are for codepoints above FFFF. (Which I guess is still someone's idea of "saving space.") Edit: Apparently the max encoding length used to be six bytes, so there's literally no plausible explanation for this that doesn't end with "thank god I stopped having to deal with MySQL over a decade ago."