Exactly, UTF-16 perfectly defines surrogate pairs for code points that do not fit into the 16 bit plane. A perfect implementation of UTF-16 should have no probl

Exactly, UTF-16 perfectly defines surrogate pairs for code points that do not fit into the 16 bit plane. A perfect implementation of UTF-16 should have no problem, unfortunately, most are broken when it comes to surrogate pairs. Many languages pre-date the introduction of UTF-16 and implemented 16 bit string encoding as UCS-2, and still do. Then there are oddities like VBA using UTF-16 internally, but converting all strings going through the Win32 API as 8-bit (relying on the current code page for character translation!)...