Again, my original parent&#x27;s statement was not about encoding or memory savings. The statement was that it was a bad idea to index into an (abstract) unicode string (of unicode code points -- not compositions thereof whatsoever).<p>I didn&#x27;t question that, but hoped to get some inspiration for sane usage of unicode handling (which I&#x27;m not sure is humanly possible except for treating it as a rather black box and make no promises).