You were probably under that impression because it used to be true. Java started supporting surrogate pairs -- i.e. it made the switch from UCS-2 to UTF-16 -- i

You were probably under that impression because it used to be true. Java started supporting surrogate pairs -- i.e. it made the switch from UCS-2 to UTF-16 -- in J2SE 5.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16#Use_in_major_operating_systems_and_environments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16#Use_in_major_operating_s...