You can access the contents randomly. Just use the index in bytes, rather than characters. Let's look at a really simple parsing task as an example: splitting t

You can access the contents randomly. Just use the index in bytes, rather than characters. Let's look at a really simple parsing task as an example: splitting tab-delimited strings, in UTF-8. First, you find the indexes in the string (in bytes) of the commas, then you use those to split out substrings. This is exactly the same code you would use with plain ASCII text, and in fact a lot of programs designed to process ASCII work unmodified with UTF-8. Another example: for a lex-and-yacc type of parser, you can use regular expressions to split a string into tokens, and then use a parser on that stream-of-tokens representation. None of this requires character indexing; just byte indexing.