I am asking you "how do you purify water"? And you're holding a bottle of Fiji and telling me "look, it's simple". You're absolutely right about what is a char

I am asking you "how do you purify water"? And you're holding a bottle of Fiji and telling me "look, it's simple". You're absolutely right about what is a character and what is a grapheme. I already said that, this subject is done. You're right, no need to come back to it. You win, I already yielded several comments ago. Now, to the other subject: I would very much prefer if we talked only about bytes. Yes, talking only about bytes makes things harder. Somewhere down the line, there must be an implementation that deals with the byte sequence. I'm talking about these, just above the assembler (for awk). There IS confusion at this level, no way to avoid it except abstracting it by yourself, byte by byte (or, 4 bytes by 4 bytes in UTF-32).