>They’re not. UTF-32 code units have a 1:1 mapping to USVs, surrogates are not valid. This is true, although very pedantic and irrelevant to the point of my co

>They’re not. UTF-32 code units have a 1:1 mapping to USVs, surrogates are not valid. This is true, although very pedantic and irrelevant to the point of my comment. The distinction only matters when you're dealing with ill-formed strings. BTW, Python strings can store surrogates. >Is it? It’s not like they’re any more useful. Arguably less so, UTF-16 is at least a somewhat common storage medium. If you aren't directly dealing with UTF-16, UTF-16 code units aren't useful at all. Code points/USVs, OTOH, are the building blocks of Unicode strings and various Unicode algorithms operate on them. They're low-level, but not useless.