What he's trying to say is that Lua's strings are capable of storing Unicode characters (they're "8-bit clean"), but that Lua's string manipulation functions ar

What he's trying to say is that Lua's strings are capable of storing Unicode characters (they're "8-bit clean"), but that Lua's string manipulation functions aren't Unicode-aware. If you want to paste Unicode characters into a string and print it later, Lua can handle it. If you want to do a pattern match on a Unicode string, you need to bring your own pattern matcher.