Very astute point and I would grant that it could be a consideration when writing a program for which you don't intend to ever output content on the web. I pers

Very astute point and I would grant that it could be a consideration when writing a program for which you don't intend to ever output content on the web. I personally believe that an extra byte per character is a rather small price to pay for all the good of utf-8 and I would not even give a second look to utf-16. Now, consider that if you decide to use utf-16 to publish your Japanese text as an HTML document (whose syntax is entirely ascii based), you might lose its "saving advantage" and could easily end up with text that is actually larger in utf-16 than in utf-8. Also take a look at this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/102205/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/102205/should...