&gt;<i>The same is true of unicode. It&#x27;s not ambiguous at all.</i><p>Only utf-8 is a very specific encoding, so converting to it is straightforward, whereas unicode is an umbrella term and the most ambiguous thing you can imagine.<p>Even saying &quot;the same is true of unicode&quot; shows confusion, as utf-8 is itself unicode. As are numerous different encodings, and then you have normalization and other subtleties.