Actually, it'd be \U10FFFF, no need for 8 digits. Java doesn't support surrogates yet, so what Java does for \u doesn't make any difference. :) \U10FFFF should expand to either one character in UCS-4, or two characters in UTF-16/UCS-2. No particular reason why it can't work for 2.0. This is similar to the UTF-8 issue wrt surrogates. Bill