Nice, down voted for someone not agreeing with me.  I&#x27;d rather know what you though was wrong with what I wrote.<p>I&#x27;ve always wanted to know how things are done internally.  Makes me a better programmer.  What I said about all this extra conversion does to performance is correct, especially when scaling up.<p>And my choice to use UTF-8 internally is a valid way to do things.  I make sure that what comes in from the outside world is UTF-8 (either by rejecting or converting) and then don&#x27;t have to worry about it from that point on.  The bulk of my code deals with outbound data so no need for me to do any encoding as it&#x27;s already UTF-8.