> decoded the string into UNICODE I think you are quite confused. 1) Unicode is not an acroynm. 2) You cannot "decode into Unicode". I think you mean "decode

> decoded the string into UNICODE I think you are quite confused. 1) Unicode is not an acroynm. 2) You cannot "decode into Unicode". I think you mean "decode into codepoints". 3) If that is what you mean, then you are wrong about sorting: Sorting UTF-8 and UTF-32 bytestrings will indeed sort them lexicographically by code point, which was the author's point. No, that will not generally be the sort you _want_; but no amount of 'decoding' will give you the sort you want. For that you need to first normalize, and then follow the collation rules, which don't sort by raw code points at all.