[estimator7292]

Stuff like this makes me so glad that in my world strings are ALWAYS ASCII and one char is always one byte. Unicode simply doesn't exist and all string manipulation can be done with a straightforward for loop or whatever.

Dealing with wide strings sounds like hell to me. Right up there with timezones. I'm perfectly happy with plain C in the embedded world.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

That English can be well represented with ASCII may have contributed to America becoming an early computing powerhouse. You could actually do things like processing and sorting and doing case insensitive comparisons on data likes names and addresses very cheaply.