[marssaxman]

That's called "dealing with the reality of international text instead of burying your head in the sand," isn't it? Bytes are not text any more than bytes are a picture or bytes are a sound recording; it is only in the context of an encoding that bytes can be interpreted as something more.

For that matter, given the inexplicable popularity of emojis, it isn't even a matter of international text anymore.

[rasz]

"dealing with raw bytes" = processing raw binary data (firmware dump, binary network protocols etc), not complete works of Shakespeare translated to 10 languages.

So yes, go ahead with 3 if you are into emoji.