Dave Crocker scripsit: > Oh? You mean that Unicode does not fit directly -- ie, with no special > encoding rules -- into 32 bits, or 24 bits, or somesuch. Nope. The Unicode character set maps characters to integers. How the integers are mapped to bytes is defined by the encoding rules, of which there are seven standard ones: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE. All have equal status. > That's the difference between native representation, versus "encoding". There is no native representation in the sense you mean. All representations are equal. -- De plichten van een docent zijn divers, John Cowan die van het gehoor ook. jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --Edsger Dijkstra http://www.ccil.org/~cowan