Surrogate pairs mean you can't do this with UTF-16 either. Combining characters make it much less useful for UTF-32, as your understanding of a character no lo

Surrogate pairs mean you can't do this with UTF-16 either. Combining characters make it much less useful for UTF-32, as your understanding of a character no longer matches the user's. So arbitrary strings can't be guaranteed to have this property no matter which standard encoding you use.