I think the proper way to do it is to have a string type and a byte-array type, like many other languages do it (not Ruby, that's a mess, too, if you ask me). T

I think the proper way to do it is to have a string type and a byte-array type, like many other languages do it (not Ruby, that's a mess, too, if you ask me). The string type is always Unicode, can be any kind of UTF encoding in the background, that's an implementation detail. Sadly most languages still require you to know that detail.