In message <57f4c81a-3537-49fa-a5f6- a0cc0d43d599 at o14g2000vbo.googlegroups.com>, rumpf_a at web.de wrote: > I am dissatisfied with Python's (or Java's) Unicode handling: > 1) IO overhead to convert UTF-8 (defacto standard on UNIX) into > UTF-16. Are you sure they're using UTF-16? I would use UCS-2 or UCS-4.